Harvest Happenings: Teens make a difference

by Hannah Wood, Founding Member, Harvest Teen Council

I joined the Harvest Teen Council (HTC) to help make a difference in my community. Being a part of the HTC has helped me to help others by doing things I enjoy. When we started the HTC earlier this year, we elected officers—President, Vice-President and Secretary. When wanting to run for these offices every candidate made a speech on why they felt they would be good for this job. After the speeches, all the members voted on who they thought would be best. Our 2017 President is Jaxon Rait, Vice-President is Hunter Parris, and Secretary is Allison Long.

Being a part of the HTC allows us to plan events in our community that we want to do as well as give back to the North Texas Food Bank. We have done a teen scary movie night, teen glow-in-the-dark capture the flag, and laser tag. Our first big fundraiser was in March it was a Hoops for Hunger 3 on 3 Basketball tournament. We met twice before the event to make sure we knew how we were going to run the event and how we were going to promote the event. We sent out emails and posted it all over Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to make sure everyone knew about the event. The night before the tournament the HTC had a work party where we organized the brackets, made signs, and signed up for work stations. While Page Austin, our Lifestyle Manager, supported and helped us, she really let us run and own the event which was awesome.

The HTC as well as other teens worked together to create a fun event for the community. Even the Northlake Police participated in the tournament! There were more than 20 teams that played and more than 100 people spectating! We raised $270 for the North Texas Food Bank, which means the HTC fed 810 people! I was surprised to learn that $1 feeds 3 people. It felt so great to give back.

“It makes you feel good to know that you made a difference in someone’s life. It’s so cool that we were able to feed 810 people just from a community basketball tournament,” said Parker Weitzer, a founding member of the HTC and emcee for the tournament.

The Harvest Teen Council looks forward to doing more events like this to help benefit the community and the North Texas Food Bank.

About Hannah Wood: Hannah is a freshman at Argyle High School. She recently won first place in News Reporting for the Dallas Morning News 26^th Annual High School Journalism Day competition. She is also the only freshman to play varsity golf for Argyle High School. When she isn’t practicing golf or doing school work, Hannah enjoys photography, babysitting Harvest kiddos, and hanging with friends.