By Izzie McLawhorn, Shield Editor-in-Chief
On Thursday, Jan. 30, the kindergarten and junior classes came together in the Student Life Center during high school lunch to assemble over 400 "Blessing Bags" to donate to the Raleigh Dream Center (RDC). The bags were packed with food, clothing, and hygiene products, along with Bible verses written by students. Junior Bible teacher Mr. Chad Huffman said, “We called it a packing party.”
NRCA donated the bags to the Raleigh Dream Center, an organization that ministers to needs in the local community. Kindergarten teacher Mrs. Julie Gardner said that the Blessing Bags “will be given out in RDC’s community outreach. They have teams of volunteers, churches, different people who go out and share the gospel and give these bags out to people in need and also to the people who come to the center who need things.”
The goal of assembling over 400 bags is to have them ready for Raleigh Dream Center to use as needs arise. “This saves them the time, energy, and expense of putting those together—they're just ready to go, ready to hand out to whoever needs them. Hopefully, this will impact our community and bless Raleigh Dream Center because they are a Christian organization sharing the love of Jesus and sharing the gospel,” Mrs. Gardner said.
The plan for the service project was first proposed by the kindergarten teachers when planning for the 2024-25 school year. In search of interactive, impactful, and hands-on projects, the teachers introduced the idea of collecting supplies and assembling Blessing Bags. The collaboration between the grades came soon after. Mrs. Gardner said, “Mrs. [Amber] Huffman is one of the members of our kindergarten team, and Mr. Huffman teaches Bible. The collaboration began when she was sharing the plans with Mr. Huffman, and he said, ‘That sounds amazing. I would love for my junior Bible classes to be a part of that,’ and so he reached out, and we were, of course, thrilled to have more people participating in the project, but also for our younger ones to have that chance to get together with the older students,” said Mrs. Gardner.
The project started by collecting the items the Raleigh Dream Center needed most. “Over two and a half weeks, we did a collection,” Mr. Huffman said. Guided by RDC’s recommended donation list, each kindergarten class was assigned a different item to bring in, and the junior classes were each assigned two different items to donate. Junior Madi Howard said, “Mr. Huffman gave us a list of supplies that we were asked to get, and we all came together and bought it all and made the bags.”
In addition to the items in the Blessing Bags, students included handwritten Bible verses. The junior Bible classes spent time crafting these cards with the kindergarteners. “We went down to the kindergarten classrooms and made little cards for the bags and wrote Bible verses on them,” said Howard. The students spent time getting to know each other and talking while doing the craft. Mrs. Gardner explained, “The older students actually had their Bibles open, showing the children where the Bible verses were and helping them write them.”
Leading up to the packing party, Mr. Huffman “asked the juniors as part of the service to sacrifice their off-campus lunch privilege to serve alongside the kindergarteners,” he said. On the morning of the packing party, Mrs. Wesley Baugess and her high school Leadership & Service elective class prepared the assembly lines while the kindergarten teachers and Mr. Huffman were teaching in their classrooms. Donated items were placed on tables around the room, and students were able to go around and pick the items to put in their bags. “We buddied up and partnered a high schooler with a kindergarten friend, and then they circled tables,” Mr. Huffman shared.
Many of the students recognized their new friends from making Bible verses together. Mrs. Gardner said, “When we went to the Student Life Center, many of those older students sought out the younger ones. They were just jumping up from eating their lunch and coming and finding the student that they had met personally. Of course, our little ones were hoping for that.”
This project taught students the importance of generosity and service. Mrs. Gardner said that the bag project has “been impactful for our students because they've been able to see that they have a lot of things, and there are people in the community who don't. That opened their eyes that they can serve.” She continued, “One of my students said today, ‘I realize that I can do this at my house. I could take a Ziploc bag, and I could find snacks and things at my house. I could make one and keep it in my car and give it out.’ I think it began to develop in their minds that they can do this. Anyone can help others. The example of the 11th graders helping them showed them the way.”
One of the goals of the project was to be a blessing to the local community. “It doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t have to go to a foreign country. You can make a difference in your own neighborhood. And the Raleigh Dream Center is just down the road. It is not far from NRCA at all. So that’s a place that is really making an impact right here where we live,” Mrs. Gardner said.
The juniors left the project with takeaways from collaborating with the kindergarteners to serve the community. Howard said, “I think it brings us together as a community and helps us to serve others as God would do for us.”
Mr. Huffman said he hopes to continue service projects like Blessing Bags in the future. “For NRCA specifically, I hope it generates excitement for more opportunities to serve.”
Many project participants hope that what started as brainstorming a new way to serve the community ends up being the beginning of a new tradition. Kindergartener Mercer R. said, “I'd like to be here one day doing this again … I'd like to be here when I am a junior.”
