A group of Park Scholars has teamed up with local organizations to sponsor a food drive with an interesting twist.

On Saturday, students and the public will have the opportunity to create sculptures on Harris Field – built entirely out of canned food. The canned food for the event is currently being collected in a campus-wide food drive.

“There are 1,100 people homeless every night in Raleigh alone,” Alyssa D’Addezio, a sophomore in biological sciences, said. “We want to gather as many people as possible [Saturday] to represent those 1,100.”

People can come learn about poverty in the Raleigh area while participating in the canned food sculpture contest. The event is part of the Canned Creations/Standing for Homelessness event in cooperation with the Raleigh/Wake Partnership to End and Prevent Homelessness and the Wake County Salvation Army.

Several months ago, Canned Creations was nothing more than an idea for the 11 Park Scholars organizing the event.

This project began as two separate entities that combined as one last month. A group of four Park Scholars, including Eric Whitmire, a junior in computer science and biomedical engineering, was working to bring Canned Creations to the campus.

At the same time another group, including D’Addezio and Emily Bissett, a sophomore in nutrition science, were making plans to educate students about homelessness – what they call “an invisible issue.”

These students aren’t blind observers, either.

“At the beginning, we interviewed people who are homeless in Raleigh. We went down to Moore Square [and] got a feel for their life stories and how they had gotten [there]… It’s an issue that really impacts everybody,” D’Addezio said.

D’Addezio wasn’t the only one who was surprised by the homeless people’s stories.

“When we talk to people, there’s crazy stuff, like people who come from a really high-paying job, but they’re poor money managers, or you have people who are domestically and sexually abused and they don’t know how to recover from that, or mentally ill,” Bissett said.

The interactions in Moore Square showed how homelessness can strike anyone at any time – regardless of economic standing, Bissett said.

“You have to take every single person’s situation into account,” she said. “One of the biggest things that people don’t realize about the homeless population is that even though they are homeless, it’s not by choice. What they’re looking for in their life is dignity.”

The Park Scholars have tried to help homeless individuals restore their dignity through volunteering.

“[Volunteering] is serving with the people and restoring the dignity back into their life that will empower them to become part of the community. It takes a lot more than just giving people things,” Bissett said.

Whitmire said he strongly encourages students to volunteer for organizations that help the homeless. He shared his experience volunteering with the Salvation Army.

“We’ve been working with the Salvation Army for a while now. We’ve been volunteering on Thursday night [at the] women and children’s center,” Whitmire said. “The Salvation Army is literally less than five minutes away, so it’s not that hard to find time to go down there.”

The program can be extremely rewarding for the volunteer, Whitmire said.

“Two or three days a week, they have the afterschool tutoring program. To see the joy on [the kids’] faces when someone older helps them – you get as much out of it as they do. That really means something,” he said.