Meanwhile, the long-running spring food drive, Cyclone Aid, will come to an end. Carl Hnatyshyn For The Journal Hundreds of community-minded St.
Meanwhile, the long-running spring food drive, Cyclone Aid, will come to an end.
Carl Hnatyshyn
For The Journal
Hundreds of community-minded St. Patrick’s High School students will be fanning out across Sarnia and Point Edward during the morning of Saturday, Dec. 2 as part of the school’s 40th annual Irish Miracle food drive.
From 9 a.m. to noon, groups of students, driven around by an equally dedicated coterie of volunteers and parents, will be travelling door-to-door across the community to collect non-perishable food items which will eventually end up at St. Vincent de Paul, providing sustenance for those in need.
After bringing in over 7,000 bags of food during last year’s drive, teacher Vanessa Borody said that students are raring to go this year, eager to once again accept the generosity of local residents in order to help out a very worthwhile cause.
Once a St. Pat’s student experiences their first Irish Miracle, Borody said, they tend to get bitten by the philanthropic bug.
“I usually tell my grade nines when they come in, ‘if you volunteer for Irish Miracle once, you’ll do it every year you’re here,’” she said. “When you try to pitch it to someone who doesn’t really know about it or hasn’t felt what it’s like to do it, it sounds like me asking you to come early on a Saturday and go outside in the cold. It doesn’t sound like fun at all.
“But once they do it, once they experience it, the energy in the room, the energy in the building and the energy in the community — it’s palpable and it’s a beautiful thing.”
The food drive got its start back in 1983, Borody said, inspired by a religion teacher who spoke about faith and finding a way of feeding the hungry in the broader community. Each year since then, thousands of St. Pat’s students and volunteers have picked up non-perishable food items donors have left on their doorsteps.
Borody herself has been involved with Irish Miracle for nearly three decades.
“In 1994 I started at St. Pat’s in grade nine (when it was) on East Street and I did it every year when I was there,” she said. “I came back a few times during university to help out if I wasn’t too far away, and when I became a teacher, I joined the committee as a teacher helper. So it’s definitely been something I’ve been involved with since I was 14 – that’s almost 30 years – and I’ve been able to watch it ebb and flow throughout the years.”
“But really Irish Miracle draws such a huge crowd because we have kids at the school whose parents did Irish Miracle and I want to say some whose grandparents were involved with Irish Miracle too.”
Not only does the annual drive collect much-needed food for people and families in need, Borody said, but it also brings the community together and it inspires the students who get involved.
“I just can’t speak highly enough about the generosity of where we live,” she said. “We go out and knock on doors for three hours early on a Saturday…and for the most part we’re so warmly received and encouraged. We have people who leave bags with notes and prayers, people try to give our students cookies and hot chocolate. It’s just incredible. And our kids get really impacted because they get an opportunity to help others…and the community also gets drawn in. It makes everybody feels good, it’s really a beautiful thing to be involved in.”
This year, Irish Miracle participants are hoping that members of the public will leave their non-perishable food items in either plastic or reusable bags.
“What we normally do is when we send our students out, they have a package with a map, information as well as grocery bags to collect food, which were donated by the grocery stores,” Borody said. “But with (plastic bags) going away, we’re going to be giving out less bags…so if community members could donate a bag or a reusable bag, we will definitely use them again.”
“People can expect us to knock on their door on Saturday morning. If they don’t want to be disturbed but they still want to give, they can just put a bag on their front porch with donated items and we will be very grateful.”
While Irish Miracle is still going strong after 40 years, another annual St. Pat’s tradition is getting a rethink. The long-running spring food drive, Cyclone Aid, will not take place anymore, though the school will be looking at other ways of supporting the former beneficiary of that initiative, the Inn of the Good Shepherd
“St. Pat’s is definitely not walking away from the Inn of the Good Shepherd, but Cyclone Aid being a second city-wide food drive within three months of the first…we’re looking at changing that and not having two food drives,” Borody said. “We found in the feedback we got from (Cyclone Aid) that it was putting too much of a strain on the community; we were asking for too much in too short of a time. Grocery prices have skyrocketed and families who used to have a bit to give are having a hard time to give as often and as generously as in the past.”
“We really want to support the Inn and we have several organizations within the school that are looking at a couple of different things to support the Inn in a different way.”
St. Patick’s High School’s 40th annual Irish Miracle will take place on Saturday, December 2nd from 9 a.m. to noon.
