A teacher's worth is priceless.  For two years, Food Rescue was in communication with Washington Township Schools.  A face to face meeting was even held in 2015, and then there were setbacks. Difficulties to overcome.  Problems to solve, and it seemed the obstacles might be too numerous.  But then one teacher, Emily Dickerson, revealed the challenge to her students, and they created a video, and it made all the difference in the world.  In January, her class and entire grade level will be piloting the first K-12 Food Rescue program in Washington Township School in Indianapolis.  So what has Emily really done?  She's made her students believe they can make a difference in that world.  Helped them believe in themselves.  Helped them discover purpose.

It's time to thank a teacher today.  They do it every day, and our world is better becasue they care!

My name is Gloria Merrell, and I volunteer for a wonderful organization known as Food Rescue. Being a freshmen at Hamilton Heights High School has given me many fantastic opportunities to prevent food waste by working with this charitable association.


The goal of Food Rescue is to save food that would have been dumped into landfills, and use it to feed our hungry friends and neighbors instead. Hamilton Heights has generously partnered with Food Rescue for several years. This means that the Hamilton Heights School Corporation is simultaneously preventing hunger AND harm to the the environment! I think, however, that we can take the entire process a step further. 


Each Tuesday, I come into the High School around 30 minutes before school starts. I find the items that students have donated for Food Rescue, and I count them. When I count food, I enter them into the Food Rescue Organizations’s online tracking tool. This fantastic web tool then converts the amount of food items that Hamilton Heights High School has saved into pounds of C02e kept out of the environment, as well as how many items and meals we have rescued as a school overall. 


Kids aren’t often motivated to do things like this. It’s hard to know that you are making important changes, especially when you can’t quite see the changes being made. That’s part of why the tool is so important! If we encourage youthful minds to help others and the environment, they will now have a direct and easy way to see just how many changes they are making! This would also track Hamilton Heights’ far-reaching impacts within our community. It would be incredibly beneficial to the Hamilton Heights School System to start seeking out clever and generous students that are willing to work as a team to impact the world positively. If we find these students, we can harvest more motivation, generosity, teamwork, and school spirit than ever before. These skills will be important throughout their entire school careers, but the lessons they learn will also benefit Hamilton Heights students for the rest of their lives.


  The favor I would like to ask each of you today is that you begin to seek out the next generation of humanitarians for our community. Starting with one or two kids in the primary, elementary, and middle school, we need to locate willingly helpful students to come into the schools early each Tuesday to count and log the Food Rescue food, without troubling our amazing cafeteria staff. If any able students are located, I would greatly appreciate it if they could have my information provided to them. Thank you so much for giving me your time and consideration.  The Impact Dashboard seen below is a product of the free online tracking tool.  This is an example of Eastview Elementary in Fayette County in Indiana.

Gloria Merrell
Indiana State Director of Student Leadership
gloria.merrell@icloud.com