Ava’s Sweet Potato Project

Ava is a student at Thomas Jefferson Middle School. A few years back, she and her family grew and donated around 600 pounds of sweet potatoes to AFAC from her grandparents farm on the Northern Neck. This year, Ava got her sister involved with planting sweet potatoes and recruited friends to help with the harvest. We asked Ava to share some words about her project:

Through our journey through middle school, we were always required to do community service, whether it be volunteering at an animal shelter, or picking up trash around a local park. But this year as eighth graders, we had to create and complete a community service project. The project has to help a surrounding community by means of creativity, action, or service.

We looked at Arlington and found that there were thousands of people who don’t receive the necessary food that they need. In the entire United States, over 40 million people don’t always have enough food to eat, with over 12 million being kids. We decided that we would grow and donate food four our community service project. My grandparents, Lois and Gary Allensworth, are farmers and provided us land by their farm for our project. We chose sweet potatoes because they have along shelf life and are fairly easy to maintain. We are happy to report that we were able to harvest over 1,100 pounds of sweet potatoes for families in need!

There are many people that go hungry throughout our state, but by giving food to a community around us, we are making an impact that is bringing the entirety of our community one step closer to stomping out starvation, and one step closer to stomping it out in the world. It may not seem like a big difference to some people, but to us, it is monumental.

Thank you Ava!