Mission Possible Food Drive Challenge
In the Fall, 2020, the students in Hilbert College’s “Jesus in Early Christianity” course joined
with the Buffalo City Mission to participate in its Mission Possible Food Drive Challenge. Using the Mission’s “Participant Manual” as a guide, we began our work in early October and finished four weeks later. One of the first things that we did was create a Facebook page to help spread awareness for a drive. We were able to create and share an event on Facebook that detailed the times and locations at which we would be collecting canned goods. This was one of the main ways in which we got the word out about the food drive. Then, during a class period, all of the students constructed and decorated boxes in a fall aesthetic so that our community members would notice them and contribute. We then placed the boxes in high traffic areas around our campus (and put a few cans in boxes before the drive started because people are more likely to donate when there is something in the boxes already!). In our view, the main challenge would not be convincing people to give, but making sure that they knew the drive was happening. It was at this point that we started our sort of “marketing campaign,” which was the majority of the work we did for the food drive. We wanted to get the word out about the drive to as many people as possible. To do this, we advertised the drive in many different ways. We reached out to the campus employees in charge of the screens around campus that tell about different 7
