Got spare change?
Donating extra coins helps the Auburn Early Learning Center's "Penny Harvest" and provides food and money to the East Alabama Food Bank.
The Penny Harvest was founded in 1995 by Linda Silvern, a former kindergarten teacher and previous director of the Early Learning Center, to combine her passion for the food bank as well as provide an educational activity for her class.
The first year brought in $146, and every year since then the harvest for pennies has grown and changed. This year, the Early Learning Center raised $1,292 to donate to the East Alabama Food Bank, an amount nearly double their $681 raised last year.
The director of the Auburn Early Learning Center, Sharon Wilbanks, said the penny harvest begins during the fall's harvest season. This ranges from mid-October to January or early February.
Wilbanks said this has been their most successful year so far.
Margaret Vollenweider, an instructor at the Early Learning Center, said while they take any coin or dollar amount, pennies are appreciated because it helps with graphing and math activities for the children and demonstrates that small things make a difference.
Once the pennies have been collected, played with, rolled and taken to the bank, the 4-year-old class takes a trip to the food bank to present the check.
"The kids get a really big kick out of being able to help and they feel really grown up," Vollenweider said.
Wilbanks said the Auburn University Bookstore has been helpful in allowing containers to be placed at the registers for people to drop in their spare change and hopes the containers will continue to stay up year-round.
"This was so tremendous, and it certainly has become a growing need," Wilbanks said.
Martha Faupel, the executive director at the East Alabama Food Bank, said she was shocked when she saw the amount that the Early Learning Center was able to raise this year.
The food bank gets it's food through the National Food Bank network, "Feeding America," and that source of food averages around 7 cents per pound.
"The Early Learning Center's donation of $1,292 enabled us to get 18,400 pounds, which is significant," Faupel said.
When the class comes in, the food bank sets up a display showing how much food the pennies enabled them to get.
This year, the truck, which carries and delivers food, couldn't hold the amount of food donated, because it was more than could be carried in one truckload.
The East Alabama serves a six-county area in East Central Alabama that includes Lee, Macon, Tallapoosa, Russell, Chambers and Barber counties.
It also provides food to agencies that have outreach to the community in need.
Faupel said the Early Learning Center's donation could not have come at a better time, because the request for food assistance is up by at least 20 percent over previous years at this time of year.
"Half of the people that are coming to our food pantries are new to hunger and have not been in this situation before, so the need is really great right now," Faupel said.
Faupel thinks that the Penny Harvest is a great illustration for how the little things matter.
"There is a Swahili proverb that says, 'Little by little builds the measure,' and that's been our experience with the penny harvest; a little bit of pennies added to another little bit, and pretty soon you end up with over 18,000 pounds of food," Faupel said.
Wilbanks said next year they plan on making the harvest even more successful by reinstating the competition between the departments in the college of human sciences.
The competition will last for about a week.
Students and faculty can drop pennies in a container for positive points and silver change in other department buckets for negative points.
Wilbanks and Vollenweider agree the Early Learning Center teaches a lot of value- based curriculum and wanted this to be a meaningful experience for the children the center serves.
"Children can identify with hunger, not in a way that we think of true hunger, or world hunger, but they can identify with being hungry and needing and wanting food," Wilbanks said. "The Penny Harvest is a way that they can help with something that is real to them and they can help solve a problem.
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