This Wednesday, June 13, Middlebrook School is holding the annual Rise Against Hunger Benefit Concert Talent Show at 7:30 p.m. in the school’s auditorium. Under Middlebrook instructional leader Janet Nobles and music educator Susan Kelly‘s direction and with Middlebrook student leadership (this year, by eighth graders Grace Cristini and Samantha Victor), this annual concert has been a cornerstone of the Wilton Interfaith Action Committee‘s (Wi-ACT) fundraising efforts for doing its annual 160,000 meal packaging event in October. Half of the gate receipts (by attendee donation) go to the Wi-ACT October event and the other half go to help to fund a separate 10,000-meal packaging event at Middlebrook, organized by Middlebrook students themselves.
Seven years of Wi-ACT’s October meal-packaging events together have resulted in 900,000 meals packaged to date. With this year’s Rise Against Hunger event scheduled for Oct. 20, organizers hope to package another 160,000 meals, to surpass the one million meals mark–enough to feed over 2,700 otherwise starving children for an entire year.
To purchase the bulk ingredients each year from Rise Against Hunger at 29-cents per meal, Wi-ACT needs to raise almost $50,000 annually. This Wednesday’s concert helps materially in that process both through its gate receipts and by giving a focal point for our very generous business donors to make their contributions. Wi-ACT is entirely volunteer led and operated so that all donations go directly and exclusively to the purchase of those bulk ingredients.
The concert itself is always a wonderful display of the amazing talents of our Wilton students in vocal and instrumental performance, dance and other art forms that make for a very lively and inspiring evening. Evening events at Middlebrook inviting and featuring its students are now part of the school’s very engaged community-building process–just as is their efforts to give back and help fight food insecurity with Rise Against Hunger.
Students are engaged at all levels–organizing, performing and creating. The artwork for the event’s poster was created by Middlebrook 8th grader Daniella Coltman.