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RUHS students participate in bake sales and supply drives to support Ukrainians during the war with Russia by SADIE SIMMONS
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Krispy Treats and has sold them out of a small stand at Hermosa Beach’s Pier Plaza. “[The turnout has] been bigger than we ever expected it to become,” Doan said. “We’ve only done the bake sale for three weekends, but we’ve made over $1,000.” All of the proceeds that Doan gets from selling the baked goods go to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), a charity organization that will use the money to help Ukrainian citizens. UNICEF specifically works to help and support children and adolescents all over the world. “We were looking at different types of charities that could help Ukraine and [UNICEF] just seemed like a really good reliable one that wouldn’t necessarily help the army but the people themselves and all of the refugees that are struggling,” Doan said. The bake sales have gone better than Doan imagined, and she has been promoting them as well as asking for more volunteers via the group’s Instagram page @CookiesForTheCause. Their group consists of around 15 RUHS students, and they have been raising money for Ukraine since the beginning of March. The group bakes around 150 treats on Saturdays and then a group of around four of them go to the Pier Plaza on Sundays from 1:30-4:30 p.m. to sell them. The group plans to continue fundraising for as long as they can, though they will be changing what charity they raise money for once the war with Ukraine is over. “We’re just starting out, but I do have big hopes that we can grow and make a really big difference in a lot of people’s Sophomores Lalitha Muttulingam, Ranya Ghazal, Kaitlives, even if it’s just getting lyn Ferrer and Kaitlyn Doan on their first day selling the [the Ukrainian citizens] a place baked goods. PHOTO COURTESY OF KAITLYN DOAN
ven though RUHS is roughly 6,300 miles from Ukraine, its students have taken charge and found local ways to support the Ukrainian citizens who have been suffering due to the war with Russia. There have been food and supply collection events, bake sales where the proceeds go to Ukraine and various other fundraising efforts. Sophomore Kaitlyn Doan came up with the idea of doing a bake sale to raise money for Ukraine. Doan has baked a variety of goods including cookies, brownies and Rice
to stay for a night or some extra food. Any difference to me would be worth the work,” Doan said. Senior Dasha Shevchenko has also been working to support Ukrainian citizens. Just a few weeks ago, Shevchenko, who is Russian, volunteered at her former school, Russian Kids Club, in San Pedro to help out at a food and supplies collections event for Ukraine. “I told a lot of my friends and my parents’ friends about the event,” Shevchenko said. “I brought in my own supplies and I stayed there to make sure that everyone who didn’t speak Russian and everyone who I invited was able to turn in their supplies,” Shevchenko said. The school collected a multitude of different items such as clothing, canned food, first aid kits, flashlights, sleeping bags and much more. The donated supplies were loaded into the trunks of the volunteers’ cars and taken to a donation site. There were around seven volunteers working at the collection event, half of which were teenagers like Shevchenko. By partaking in this event, she hoped that she could help have an impact on the Ukrainian citizens’ lives despite the miles between them. “We just wanted to do whatever we could [to help] in this situation because we’re so far away and we felt that this was really the best we could do to make some sort of impact and help [Ukrainians],” Shevchenko said. Shevchenko does not currently have any specific fundraising plans for the future but she would love to continue to help Ukraine if the opportunity presents itself again. “Part of my extended family lives in Ukraine, and I’ve been seeing the effects [the war is] having on them. So I just wanted to do something to help everybody that
Senior Dasha Shevchenko drops off donated supplies at her Russian school. PHOTO COURTESY OF DASHA SHEVCHENKO
is going through this tough time right now, and I feel like this was one of the more meaningful ways I could make an impact,” Shevchenko said. Like Shevchenko, Doan is eager to do anything she can to help the people of Ukraine. Doan is happy that she found a way to use her passion for baking to help the Ukrainians in their time of need. “I feel like the last two years have been so hard with COVID and everything has changed so much. I felt like I couldn’t really do anything to stop or help with COVID, but I feel like I could at least do something to help with [the war in Ukraine],” Doan said.
The Redondo Beach City Council approved a community garden for Alta Vista Park by MARLIE CORNWELL
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here are about 1.4 acres of park space per 1,000 residents in Redondo Beach. Most cities in LA county have more than twice that, according to Easy Reader. That’s one of the reasons that on March 15, 2022, the Redondo Beach City Council made the decision to give Redondo Beach’s Alta Vista Park a community garden. A community garden is a garden that a community as a whole adds to and learns from. Once Alta Vista Park’s community garden is done, 26 four-by-eight-foot gardening beds will each be available for Redondo Beach residents to rent for $100 per year, on a first-come-first-serve basis. Redondo Beach community garden members will be allowed to plant anything they want on their plot (with some exceptions).
The City Council voted in favor of the garden with a 4-1 vote. Everyone voted yes, except District 5 Councilmember Laura Emdee. According to District 1 Councilmember Nils Nehrenheim, Emdee was opposed to excess signage, and she didn’t want the garden to be associated with the South Bay Parkland Conservancy (SBPC). The original idea of the community garden, however, started with failure. In 2015, there was an attempt to give Redondo Beach a community garden like the other beach cities. “But the efforts were unconventional,” Brianna Egan, chair of the Redondo Beach Community Garden Committee, said, “and the city pretty quickly shut it down.” However, in 2020, Nehrenheim got an email from a Redondo resident about hav-
ing a garden on an unused portion of Alta Vista Park. After that, he scheduled a meeting with Egan and the SBPC, and a plan was put into action for the new community garden. “We talked about what it would take, the plan, where to go, what to do, approximate timelines, requirements and some problems along the way that we could foresee. We got a basic plan together to move forward, and then we started executing it,” Nehrenheim said. The SBPC is an established nonprofit that has been doing a lot of environmental work and habitat restoration in Redondo Beach and the South Bay. According to Egan, she took the lead position in carrying out most of the ideas relating to the garden and pushing them
along. Many of her suggestions were for a workshop space with an outdoor classroom, a community compost system and a community orchard with drought-tolerant plants. SBPC aims to have the community garden open and ready by summer of 2022 with all of Egan’s ideas implemented. The garden’s completion will give Redondo Beach residents the chance of becoming a member of the city’s first community garden, according to Egan and Nehrenheim. “There is therapeutic value in learning how to grow food and conserve resources, and in learning about the native pollinators, the environment, the sun and the weather patterns,” Egan said. “I think just being connected with the Earth is really special.”