Steveanna Wynn
January 2017… Last year, the third grade student reporters at Cole Manor Elementary School in the Norristown Area School District wrote an article for the Healthy NewsWorks book, Leading Healthy Change In Our Communities 2016. The article profiled health leader Steveanna Wynn and her work as executive director of Share Food Program, a Philadelphia nonprofit that supplies affordable groceries to families and food to food cupboards.
This year, the entire Cole Manor third grade class of one hundred students will collaborate with Share for a service project on hunger and homelessness. The service project is part of a schoolwide service project initiative.
As third grade teacher Natalie Shuler said, the “project is about giving back and realizing that there are people who are in need and we can take time out of our day—our lives—and help those people who are in need.” While these students are only in third grade, Mrs. Shuler believes that “they can do little things that can make a huge difference in people’s lives.”
Ms. Wynn will visit the school to discuss Share’s mission, its work to fight hunger in the community, sources of food donations, and how food donations are allocated. This background will help prepare students for a field trip to Share in February to pack food boxes for people in need.
Third grade students who are on the staff of the Cole Manor Healthy Comet, a health-focused school newspaper produced in partnership with Healthy NewsWorks, will write about the collaboration for an upcoming issue.
Students taking part in the field trip also will give a presentation at a schoolwide exposition in June. It will include a collection of photo essays, service project timelines, and student journal entries about what the students have learned and done throughout the year, Mrs. Shuler said.
—By Zubin Hill