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Students Organize Annual Holiday Meal

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Pouring rain certainly did not dampen the high spirits of charitable students on Saturday. Band and orchestra students filled the Jacket Gym with festive music, as the attendees of the Holiday Meal were escorted inside and served warm chicken noodle soup as an appetizer.

On December 10, 2016, Berkeley High School hosted its annual meal with help from over 160 parent and student volunteers.

“We heard about this a long time ago. This is our third time being here.” said Christopher Torrence, who is currently living out of his van with his wife Katrina. Christopher and Katrina were two of the around 240 guests pleasantly surprised by the graciousness of the Berkeley High community this past Saturday.

Led this year by Zoey Horowitz, a senior in Academic Choice, the Meal held significant changes in the way it was set up and run, as opposed to previous years. For one, Horowitz reached out to the City of Berkeley for support, a first for the existence of the Holiday Meal at BHS. She’s been connected with Paul Buddenhagen, the director of the Health, Housing and Community Services for the City of Berkeley since February 2016 about attending the meal to provide his services. “I really urged the guests not to just go up to him and ask him for a list of resources, but to tell him what he could be doing better for them” said Horowitz. “I told them to go back and have that conversation with him and start that dialogue because homelessness is pushed aside a lot in Berkeley even though it’s such a large issue.” For the first time ever, attendants of the meal had access to a provider of human services in which they were able to receive more information about resources that the city offers for homeless support.

“We, through the city of Berkeley, in compliance with the city council policies, work on both the strategies and policies for homeless services,” Buddenhagen said of the department. He continued, “We also provide some services ourselves, and mostly we contract services out to community nonprofits to provide things like shelters, showers, meals, as well as permanent supportive housing, which is really the answer to homelessness.” There were also two translators for guests who did not speak English or may have been deaf at the Meal, which helped lower language barriers and add to the inclusive air of the event.

“I think it’s all about merging communities,” Horowitz said. “Every single day at Berkeley High, we have people eating lunch across the street at the park and sitting next to them is a homeless person who’s starving … I think it should be more often that we merge these communities, but if we only do it once a year we’re doing it in a really beautiful way…” said Horowitz.

Another idea was handing out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches prior to the meal. The aim of handing out sandwiches was to get the word out to so people in the homeless encampments, who wouldn’t have necessarily attended, knew about the opportunity. “Some people believe that the encampments are people who don’t want services and want to be out there alone. But everybody needs help, and everybody needs food, and everybody needs warm clothing,” said Horowitz.