Acacia Day of Service provides for all
Beth Neal, vice president of the Acacia PTA Board, hosted a food drive on Jan. 17 at Acacia Elementary School in order to help those in need of food. People across the entire community were able to come together and donate about 4000 pounds of food to Adelante Comunidad Conejo.
According to their website, Adelante is an organization that strives to “address concerns within the Conejo Valley Spanish speaking community regarding opportunities and services offered to our children in the local public schools.”
Neal came across Adelante because of Dr. Betsy Connolly, former school board trustee, and Carol Shelton, one of the board members of Adelante. “I said ‘Listen, if I can pull together like a drive-thru food drive, where people just drive through our little circle, pop the trunk, you know, we take the stuff, you say goodbye. If I can pull that off, can you open up Adelante on Monday the 18th so we can drop off the donations?’ [Shelton’s] like, ‘Yeah, totally,’” Neal said.
This is Neal’s third year of hosting this drive; however, this year’s drive was especially successful despite the pandemic. “The community support was just overwhelming. I do believe that we’re in that weird time, where people are…aching for a way to help their neighbor and they don’t know how,” Neal said. “I [also] think for our volunteers, [that there was a] boost to their mental health by being able to help somebody. I think they probably received more gifts that day than they ever expected because they were able to do something and feel good.”
