Student Council (StuCo) has completed its first Caring Closet Donation Drive, collecting school supplies, clothing and hygiene products for students at Faiss Middle School.
The drive was led by junior Aldrich Gabriel Razon, who serves as the Community Service head for StuCo.
“This was my first time organizing a drive like this,” Razon said. “ I planned all the dates for it, collaboration with clubs and then just getting the word out to people.”
The Caring Closet at Faiss Middle School was originally started by junior Sienna Suarez as part of the Girl Scout Gold Award project. Suarez collaborated with Razon over the summer to organize a schoolwide drive to restock the closet.
Suarez said. “When I first began, it was just a room full of items that were disorganized, and most of the clothing was dirty and needed to be cleaned. My project focused on transforming it into a clean, organized, and welcoming space where students could actually find what they needed. Lately, I’ve been hearing amazing stories about the impact it’s had for students at Faiss, which makes me even more motivated to keep building it up.”
Donations were collected in the school library before and after school and during lunch. Clubs including HOSA, NHS, and Key Club offered service hours to encourage participation.
“I’d say our challenge was definitely just getting the word out,” Razon said. “We noticed in the first week, a lot of clubs weren’t really actively participating in it or that they hadn’t said much to their members, so the first week there wasn’t a lot of donations, but once word got around, we were able to get a pretty high amount in the second week.”
With the success of the drive, StuCo plans to make the Caring Closet a recurring project to support other schools in need.
“We wanted to try and make it an every other quarter thing,” Razon said. “We wanted to do the first and third quarter and then we wanted to kind of pass it down through StuCo to do it throughout the course of the next couple years. I think it’s important to support these students because everyone deserves to have equal quality of education and tools for success.”
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