Harvest Festival
Harvest is the time when we are thankful for the food we have; food which has been growing over the year and stored for us to use in the future, as well as fresh produce. St. Stephens Primary School has gathered many food products such as dry rice, pasta, crisps and cereals. All the food we have collected will be given to those in need in the local area.
This year, our Young Ambassadors have had a particular focus on homelessness. Some of our collection is going to The Newham Renewal Programme. This is a charity who help local people, including a foodbank those who are homeless or in need. Ruth Bravery came in to tell us how the food is distributed to those who require it.
On behalf of the groups who will be receiving the produce, we thank all parents, carers and children for generously donating all their dry food and contributing to the abundant display we have this year.
In June a new group of pupils were put together to form The Young Ambassadors. We were set up to run projects that we felt were important to us within our local community and to make people aware of these issues. We spent some time discussing and voting on issues that were close to our heart and together wanted to start a project on homelessness.
We did lots of research about homelessness and created a presentation which we performed for the whole school to make people aware of the problem and to let them know what we were going to do about it.
September arrived and the Harvest Festival was fast approaching. We decided that this was the perfect event for the pupils and the community to get involved with helping the homeless and those in need locally. So we put our heads together to think about how we could raise the profile of the Harvest Festival and encourage more pupils to bring food in for our collection to help the homeless in our local area.
We contacted some local charities about coming into the school to talk to the pupils and to us about how they help the homeless in our community. We set up and ran class assemblies to make our classmates more aware of homelessness and why it was important to donate to this worthy cause. We even gave them ideas about what they could bring in.
The last month has seen pupils from all over St. Stephen's Primary School bringing in bags and bags of food for our annual Harvest Festival collection, which is the largest collection we have ever seen.
On Monday we met Ruth from the Newham Renewals Programme and she took two assemblies, talking to the children about what the charity does and how we can help. We had the privilege of spending another hour with Ruth talking about how we could be more involved in the charity too. We talked about organising some volunteering at the food bank as well as organising some events and collections with the local community.
Because we collected so much food we were able to share the collection between four different charities working for food banks and to help the homeless. This experience at the start of our very important project has made us feel very proud of our school and especially our parents, who gave so generously and helped so many people in the local community, as well as making the first step in our project a huge success.
Thank you very much to all the parents who donated food for this year's Harvest Festival
by the Young Ambassadors
