All photos by Haset Tesfaw.
Every Tuesday the MHS Key Club meets outside of Cafeteria A and heads over to the First Baptist Church to start unpacking food for The Bread of Life. The Bread of Life is a group that has come together to pack food and give it to people who are less fortunate. Their main goal is to help and contribute to the community as much as they can. But how was this connection between the Key Club and The Bread of Life even formed?
Allison Yu, the current president of Key Club, explained, “I go to the teen center and I’m a worker at the Malden Teen Enrichment Center and the people at Bread of Life said that they needed people on Tuesdays to kind of help them unpack and originally I thought that Key Club could be a good use of having members go there and help them unpack. But it became more of a thing where we stayed to actually help them pack the food and hand them out to the people who take their food.
Everyone in Key Club just wants to benefit the community and help out as much as they can, as they know that everyone needs help in some way and that some people out there are struggling. The students who volunteer are productive and get a lot of food packed and ready to go even in just a few hours a week that they are volunteering.
Not only do they work hard, but they work fast. “I volunteer to help out the community and to see however I can help out and benefit as much as possible. So through Key Club and other organizations, it’s just good to be involved in your community and see how you can help it as much as possible,” Nick Duggan, Key Club’s 2023-2024 school year president stated. Together they work to create a fun but productive environment in which they pack as many meals as they can in the allotted time.
The volunteers meet up at the First Baptist Church where they start unpacking the food from the van tha
t arrives at around 2:30, at 5:30 they start preparing for the people lined up, and at 6:30 they start to close up. The Bread of Life packs foods like apples, juices, bread, croissants, and more. They have a variety of great foods for people who need them.
The volunteers help out for many reasons but mostly because they want to be more active and help out in their community. “I think that as president at the beginning, I was kind of trying to rebrand the club to something not just for people to get hours and just leave. It has to be a place where you can have fun and you get to volunteer and help with the community but also give members a chance to explore different parts of the city and parts of Boston, and also participate in activities that they wouldn’t usually do like helping kids out in sports, doing Bread of Life activities, or cheering for walkers at the Alzheimer's Walk,” Allison Yu says, as she talks about her overall experience being president.
Duggan also has the same future goals and thinks that he has a lot that he can offer to this club. Overall, the Key Club wishes to increase participation and the number of events so that the volunteers can help out their community even more.
