News
SUNTEP Prince Albert’s Giving Week Tradition Returns
By Beige Unger, SUNTEP Prince Albert Faculty
Dec 10, 2021
Things are beginning to look like a new normal at the Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program (SUNTEP) in Prince Albert. We have started another academic year and are happy to see more faces on campus.
Recently elections were held, and a 2021-2022 Student Representative Council (SRC) was chosen. The SUNTEP SRC takes an active role in the leadership of the student body by planning and organizing extracurricular events in our communities and across campus. All activities help students reduce stress, spend time supporting each other, and often promote wellness.
This year, the council’s first order of business was to get students engaged and to provide help in our local community. Both activities have been hard to do during the past year as students spent the majority of their time learning and engaging from home. The SRC came up with a great idea to bring the community and students back together with an initiative named “Giving Week.” From October 12-15, 2021, students worked towards the common goal of giving back to the community.
The student body, consisting of the first-, second-, and third-year students, participated in the SRC-led “Giving Week.” Students spent the week collecting and bringing in donations for the Prince Albert Food Bank. The Food Bank provides emergency hampers to those in need which include food, and other household supplies. They also serve as a pet-friendly winter warm-up shelter, providing pet food, coats, and other supplies to those in need in Prince Albert. Over the past year, the Prince Albert Food Bank provided an average of 1,000 hampers per month, which assisted approximately 3,000 people, with 50% of those helped being children. This organization is integral to the community and creates a large impact on everyone who uses its services.
Every day during “Giving Week” SUNTEP students could be seen hauling in canned/dry goods, pasta, diapers, and hygiene items that the Food Bank desperately needed. By the end of the four days, the classrooms were full of donations, and the job of counting and sorting began. Overall, the students collected just over 1,600 items and delivered two truck boxes full of donations to the Food Bank.
As an added gesture, the donation was made in the late John Thorton’s name. John was a long-term Indigenous Studies sessional instructor at SUNTEP. At the time of his passing in lieu of flowers, his family requested donations be made to the Prince Albert Food Bank.
Our students donated hours of their time to time to this initiative and we are very proud of their dedication to our community. We are happy to work with this organization and believe in its mandate to support families and children through food security. The Prince Albert Food Bank is always looking for volunteers and donations, visit them online at www.pafoodbank.ca for more information!
