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The Black Bear Exchange and the Classified Employee Advisory Council held a food drive Oct. 16 in hopes of filling a school bus with non-perishable food items for those in need.
“I’ve been on campus for 24 years, and I’ve watched the mill in Old Town open, shut, open, shut. I mean, people in the area are all losing their jobs,” said Robin Arnold, president of the council. “We’re paying $4 and something for oil, and with all the layoffs happening across state, we wanted to do something to help our community,”
The event had roughly 10 to 20 volunteers working throughout the week to get the food drive running, and they were lucky enough to receive a little extra help. Radio station 104.7 FM’s broadcaster Paul Dupuis ran into friend and council treasurer Ranee Dow, and realized they both wanted to reach the community for different reasons and that teaming up to do so only made sense.
“We were talking about how I had just gotten back on the air, and one of the things I said is, ‘I’d love to start getting the radio station out to the community.’ And then she said, ‘Well, guess what we’re going to be doing?’ So it just all kind of happened by accident. We quickly agreed, ‘OK, we should team up together.’ And it gets our radio station out and about, and it helps them promote something that’s very worthwhile,” Dupuis said.
Broadcasted on three different frequencies — 104.7, 99.1, and 103.3 — the food drive reached a large range of Maine area, covering the greater Bangor area to Ellsworth and the Downeast coast, and then on to Rockland and the mid coast.
“That’s another thing that excited me about this event, is that homecoming is such a huge thing for the university, and statewide there are so many ties to the university itself,” Dupuis said. “So just knowing that a whole good chunk of Maine people are hearing this and hopefully if they can’t make it out today, we know that a lot of Mainers are going to be heading toward the campus for the weekend and that maybe they’ll think about the exchange or do something with filling the bus today.”
Lauren Cappuccio, a Junior employee of the Bodwell Center, helped with the event and said Arnold’s idea to fill the bus should hopefully get a message to people.
“We know that a lot of people do the ‘stuff the box with school supplies,’ and that’s always been a really successful idea,” Cappuccio said. “Robin came up with the idea to try to fill a bus with food because it is still kind of back-to-school time, and it’s really important to anyone’s education or work to have a good meal and be fully fed.”
This is not the first food drive the Black Bear Exchange has done, but Cappuccio said it usually happens elsewhere and is not as public as this one.
“We do some [food drives] over at IGA [in Orono], and a lot at the Natural Living Center, but this is our first really public, planned event,” Cappuccio said.
The council plans to do more in the near future.
“We try to fill the bus with food; we’ll have a holiday dinner for a dollar raffle,” Arnold said. “Every year we’re going to try to do three or four [fundraisers] with our group.”
Dupuis and his co-broadcaster, Kat Walls, say they are always willing to broadcast for this cause or do whatever possible to get the word out there.
“I’m sure that if there are other things they need help with, we’re never going to say no,” Dupuis said. “So whether it’s coming up to do broadcast or at least sharing the message on the air, you know, we’re willing to really do whatever it takes to help out this cause.”
Bangor Daily News