Community Awareness Committee LEads Successful Toy Drive

CAC, the community awareness committee, hosts the Appalachian Gift Drive every year in efforts of providing impoverished children in Appalachia with toys with Christmas. This year CAC welcomed its newest club administrator and Sacred Heart’s most recent addition to the religion department, Dustin Hungerford. Under his leadership, this has been one of the most successful toy drives SHA has seen according to Colonel Hardesty, but Hungerford gives all the credit to the Sacred Heart community. “The amount of gifts had everything to do with SHA’s response to the needs out there,” said Hungerford.
They toy drive is the biggest event CAC hosts, “The Appalachian Gift Drive is the most work intensive,” Hungerford said. It is a rewarding as well, especially for the girls who went to Appalachia to deliver the toys. “I think for all of [the girls] it really made a difference in helping them see how fortunate they are,” he said. Hand in Hand Ministries collects throughout December, but “[Sacred Heart] is one of a couple big donors,” Hungerford said. This year SHA collected 1059 toys and 500 dollars in cash. “Colonel drove the truck full of toys to Kermit, West Virginia, where Hand In Hand ministries is located,” once he arrived, “we shifted the toys from our truck to their storage unit,” Hungerford said.
This year, the day CAC arrived to the small town of Kermit a local mine had shut down. Hungerford said, “Just within that day itself with one mine shutting down about 1500 jobs in total were lost.” Sacred Heart has not been directly impacted by these everyday losses and poverty, but Hungerford says, “We nurture our own spiritual life through the giving to others.
This may be the season of giving, but Sacred Heart Academy as a Catholic Community stands firmly in their idea of Christmas being a time to thank God for our family, friends, and Jesus Christ’s forgiveness. Hungerford commented on this from a Catholic perspective, “the earth is not bad, goods are not bad, and these children don’t have anything, so to give them a material good to focus on as a way of sharing our love is important.” He added, “It is when we go to excess that we have a problem and I don’t think these kids are anywhere near excess”. In the years to come Hungerford hopes to open up the toys drive to other schools. No plans are final, but with the success SHA has had alone, adding more schools to the drive would increase the amount of families we could serve.
CAC is currently working on a fundraiser for a young girl in India. “They are helping to raise enough money so that she could go to school,” Hungerford said, “If we board these girls in a school they are able to get out of the cycle of forced prostitution.” Whether these social and economic issues are occurring in India or Appalachia, CAC is willing to help, and more importantly they want the entire community to pitch in as well. For those of you interested in making a difference in the world sign up for CAC, the Community Awareness Committee.