Diya Boini, an Academy of the Canyons junior, held a food drive in December to help support families facing food insecurity and was able to donate about 1,200 pounds of food to the Santa Clarita Valley Food Pantry.
Boini said she did not expect the outcome but was grateful for the community showing up to help others.
“It was so much more successful than I was thinking. Like, oh, my God. What I hoped to achieve was one-tenth of what I ended up getting,” Boini said. “Because the entire summer, I was planning, and I was coordinating with my food coordinator, Rachel (Compton), and I was talking to the principal of Cedarcreek Elementary School.”
Boini said she did a lot of advertising for her food drive.
“I genuinely thought because it’s the holiday time, or maybe it’s because I’m a high school student and they wanted to support me, but I got so much more food than I was expecting. It filled up like almost half of my garage,” Boini said.
She added that after the food drive was over at Cedarcreek, she took home the donations to sort through everything and that it filled up half of her garage and then a few days later, she took the donations to the SCV Food Pantry.
“I had to use two cars, fully stocked from the roof of the car to the bottom of the car, filled up every single seat, the entire trunk,” Boini said.
Boini said that she was thankful for the community donating and that she plans to do more food drives in the future.
