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Care closet
From backpacks to Care Closets, 2 Liberty students start program
By Julie Laakko-Swanson
julie.laakko-swanson@edwpub.net
EDWARDSVILLE — Great ideas can come from the smallest places, such as a student effort to take care of fellow students that started with a backpack.
Students Veda Kommineni and Caroline James, who recently finished three years at Liberty Middle School and are entering their freshman year at Edwardsville High School in the fall, started a city-wide initiative to help low-income students across District 7.
Being social-minded, the pair started to notice an issue at their school earlier this year, and decided to do something about it.
“It started because we saw people in the cafeteria who weren’t eating,” James recalled. “We thought, ‘We should bring them food. Why aren’t they eating?’”
The friends began to bring granola bars and snacks in their backpacks to hand out to students who needed something to eat. The inventory soon outgrew their backpacks, so the girls decided to move to a locker. They shared a locker for their school supplies in James’ locker and used Kommineni’s locker for their cause of helping others.
They stocked the locker with granola bars, bags of chips, bottled water and other shelf-safe snacks from their own home pantries and spread the word. Any student who needed a snack was invited to stop at a locker and take what they needed, during or after school. The girls restocked the lockers about once or twice a week.
“It was always a joy to see kids going up to the locker to get something, and to see it’s actually working, doing its purpose,” James said.
When their school social worker, Nicole Zullig, heard about their project, she said it “could not have been at a more perfect time.” She approached the girls about their project, after she heard them talking about putting food in a locker.
