Spaulding student organizes collection drive
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Ashley Cota, 16, of Barre poses with some of the food donated as part of her collection at Spaulding High School for the annual Stuff-a-Truck program to feed the needy during the holidays. Stefan Hard/Times Argus |
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By Stefan Hard Times Argus Staff - Published: November 20, 2008
BARRE — As Thanksgiving approaches, most people get excited, anticipating getting together with family and friends and feasting, often to pleasurable excess.
Sixteen-year-old Ashley Cota of Barre is no different — she, too, looks forward to Thanksgiving, especially considering the holiday closely follows her Nov. 22 birthday. It's always banner week for her.
But she gets even more excited about her tradition of getting together with friends on her birthday and donating food for those who might not have such happy prospects for Thanksgiving.
Cota gives thanks in more than a prayer and an appreciative glance around the Thanksgiving table to those who helped prepare the meal, and that might include her mom, Jeannine, older sister, Britney, and older brother, Gregory.
Cota, for seven years running, since she was 11, has organized a collection drive with help from a few of her friends to collect money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation or for the American Legion's veterans programs, or to collect clothing and non-perishable food items for the Salvation Army, most recently through the local Stuff-A-Truck program. Stuff-A-Truck parks an empty semi trailer in the Berlin Mall Parking lot just before Thanksgiving for a few days and collects charitable donations of food and money in hopes of filling the trailer.
Last year, for her 16th birthday, Cota and several of her friends rented a travel trailer and spent the night next to the Stuff-A-Truck having a giggle-rich slumber party in their cozy quarters before eating out for an early breakfast, then helping out the Stuff-A-Truck for the day.
This year, for her 17th birthday, Cota is not renting a trailer, but she and sidekick Brenna LaPerle, 16, of Barre and their friends are having the usual slumber party and 6 a.m. breakfast out before helping the Stuff-a-Truck program.
Cota and her friends have already had a mini-Stuff-a-Truck event of their own at Spaulding High School. When the school's health advisory committee voiced a desire to do a food drive on the school's Health Wellness Day this year, they heard that Cota was already organizing one with the school's Junior ROTC (she used to be a member), and so Cota's squad and the committee joined forces, placing empty crates in 15 classrooms for collection on Spaulding's Health Wellness Day, Nov. 6. Local radio station 107.1 FRANK-FM, already a major sponsor of Stuff-a-Truck, agreed to promote the Spaulding event and the Junior ROTC program arranged for the Vermont Army National Guard to send a military truck and crew down to the school to collect the food and clothing donations and haul them back to the Berlin Armory for storage until the Stuff-a-Truck opens Nov. 20 at the Berlin Mall. It will go through Nov. 22, with only food and money being accepted.
"It was so much fun," said Cota of the Spaulding event. "I felt so good about seeing everybody helping out."
Cota knows both sides of the "helping out" equation, and her generous annual effort has a deeper personal meaning for her than it might for most teenagers. When she was younger, in her elementary school ears, her mother Jeannine was a single mom, and for a couple of years, times were tough.
"There were times when we didn't have enough money to put food on the table," said Cota. "We used the Salvation Army because otherwise we would have been unable to have dinner at night."
Cota doesn't have a vivid memory of those tough times, but her mom, Jeannine (now Jeannine Simpkins) remembers all too well, and she's filled in some of he details for her daughter about how the Salvation Army saved the day on more than one Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Like Ashley, Jeannine has returned the favor for years, most recently championing charitable collection efforts around the holidays for the past two years at her current employer, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Waterbury.
Next year at Spaulding, Cota and her friends hope to take their Stuff-A-Truck collection drive to the next effort, introducing an element of competition to raise the stakes.
Cota said she plans to issue a challenge to other schools in central Vermont to see who can donate the most to Stuff-A-Truck, and when she tells you this, the gleam in her eye and jaunty crank of her head tells you that she doesn't plan on letting her classmates at Spaulding fall short.
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