The BICS Parent Advisory Council is hoping to keep a popular school initiative on the menu once students return from winter break.
The Hot Lunch program, which runs on Fridays at Bowen Island Community School, is the PAC’s largest fundraiser of the year, raising money for items such as sports equipment and apparel, playground equipment, and more. A group of volunteers spends the morning in the school preparing food, and then in the early afternoon head to the various BICS classrooms to deliver a hot dish to the children.
Brittany Yu is a PAC member who has also taken on the role of ‘Hot Lunch Lady’ at the school. “It’s an amazing way to not have to cook lunch once a week. I know my kids really look forward to hot lunch, and I think a lot of kids really do,” she says.
“It’s also a great way to build community, there’s usually about four volunteers so it’s a lot of fun to hang out and get to know other people in your community that maybe you haven’t met yet,” adds Yu.
Like many programs, Hot Lunch disappeared during the pandemic, only reappearing in April this year. Yu says it’s a new group of parents involved, so they’ve been running the lunches with just the concept to go off of, rather than any concrete details of how it was done in the past.
“We really had to start the program from the ground up which was a challenge… And we just barely got it off the ground. This has been our first year getting it going from the beginning of the year and it’s been challenging to reinvent the whole thing. But it’s also exciting because it means we can start from scratch,” explains Yu.
Last week’s volunteers included Mayor Andrew Leonard and his wife Chela Davison, who spent their shift cutting apples and running lasagna from the gym-adjacent kitchen to the classrooms upstairs. The dishes are very well received by the island’s young residents, but to keep the plates coming Yu says the team needs more help. There is still the majority of the school year to go in 2024, and plenty of unfilled volunteer spaces for the many Fridays ahead.
There are different shifts available during Hot Lunch, including a lead shift starting at 10 am. Yu says ideally this would be for a person who hopes to volunteer at more than one lunch, so they could get the hang of the program and help guide new volunteers through it each week. The lead role would wrap around 12:30 pm.
Temporary roles also take from 11 am to 1 pm, consisting of food preparation such as cutting fruits and vegetables and portioning food, and a Noon to 2 pm shift involving delivering the food to classrooms. Food is pre-ordered so there’s no cooking, but everybody on the team does help out with dishes.
Given the desire to keep the program running, Yu says all the roles are equally important. “If you volunteer once that’s amazing, you could also volunteer multiple times and become a lead helper, and help lead the hot lunch.”
Yu acknowledges in the current economic climate it’s been more difficult for parents to find time to volunteer, especially when one or both parents in a household need to work extra shifts or even jobs. “That’s why if you even have an hour or two of your time to give that helps the school so much,” says Yu.
The PAC is also looking for volunteers for other events too, such as dances, movie nights, and speaker series. Yu says the commitment is very flexible, and you don’t have to be a full PAC member to help out.
“These are the things that we’ve been talking about doing, we just haven’t had the volunteers to help get it running. So if we had parents who were interested in just picking up little shifts that would be amazing,” she says.
