Downtown Phoenix campus kicked off Homecoming Week on Monday with the Hearts of Gold Service Project, at which students served dinner to families at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul of Phoenix.
About 150 homeless and poor families gathered in the dining hall of the St. Vincent de Paul charity and received meals prepared by ASU students and members of the community.
Nonprofit leadership and management sophomore Lorenzo Salgado is the director for the Programming and Activities Board for the Downtown campus, and helped with the dinner.
“We did this dinner because we want to get involved as much as we can in the community,” Salgado said. “With the economic crisis, food banks are seeing less food items on their shelves, and this is our way of giving back during a rough time.”
ASU has distributed boxes across the Downtown campus for a weeklong food drive to collect nonperishable food items for St. Vincent de Paul.
Program assistant for the Student Engagement department and Recreation and tourism management junior Edyth Haro wanted to reach the community through the food drive and dinner.
“I really wanted to support what St. Vincent de Paul does for these families,” Haro said.
Nursing sophomore Aldo Gonzalez was involved with the marketing aspect of the event and said he wanted to show students that the Downtown campus could have serious events through this service project.
“We didn’t have much of a turnout at events on the Downtown campus before, because it was newer and most people would go to Tempe for events since people don’t always like to take the shuttle,” Gonzalez said. “I wanted to help evolve the Downtown campus, because right now we can make it anything we want it to be.”
Volunteers of the project were divided into groups by jobs. Some unloaded trucks filled with donated items, some sat families down at their tables, and others cooked and served the food.
The other volunteers, besides the eight people that came from ASU, consisted of members of a local high-school sports team and members of the Phoenix community.
“When I was smaller, my family was less fortunate and sometimes we needed help,” Gonzalez said. “I wanted to help families in need, because people helped my family.”
Reach the reporter at allison.carlin@asu.edu.
