St. John’s SAAC holds ninth annual Kids Fighting Hunger event

Last Sunday, over 250 St. John’s student athletes volunteered alongside the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), SJU Campus Ministry, St. John’s Senate, Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity and members of the Granite Rotary Club in St. Cloud to pack meals for underprivileged communities and families in the CSB+SJU community and across the world.

Multiple SAAC members said that, by raising donations and packaging food, SJU athletics exemplified what it truly means to be a “Johnnie” by performing service within the community.

“Immediately, it just kind of rings the bell of ‘community’ for me. I mean, giving back to this community that’s given us so much as students and athletes here is the least we can do,” SJU senior swimmer and sitting president of SAAC Colby Kern said.SJU senior Max Lelwica, the chair of Kids Fighting Hunger for SAAC and track and field athlete, discussed the Benedictine values he sees in volunteering.

“The two [values] I hear most are ‘service’ and ‘community,’ and all Benedictines stand for service,” Lelwica said. “Just providing that everybody is getting together and working to provide for kids across the world that are suffering from food insecurity wherever it may be. Also, it’s bringing the community together. We had over 300 volunteers, I think. And we had a bunch of other kind of organizations — whether they’re on campus or off-campus — that all came together.”

Beginning as a community initiative, packaging meals started nine years ago under the guidance of then-golf coach Bob Alpers and the Johnnie golf squad. Alpers currently serves as the St. John’s athletic director and is set to retire this year.

“When I was coaching golf, our golf team always did a service project, and they chose to do work with Kids Fighting Hunger. They’ve got a big Thanksgiving event — ‘We Are Thankful’ — and so we went to that. And then the guys on the golf team said, ‘Guys, if we could ever do something like this and bring all of our athletes, we could crush this,’” Alpers said.

SAAC fundraised throughout fall, winter and much of the spring sporting event season to raise donations for funding the annual food packing event.

“With our other partners: the [St. John’s] Senate, the Rotary, Campus Ministry, also Student Development — and our fundraising efforts… we were able to raise over $17,000 and pack 94,000 meals in about a three-hour time span on a Sunday,” Alpers said.

For Alpers, watching student athletes sacrificing their time for others is all the reward he needs. “I am inspired by the good that our guys are excited to do. They really take great ownership of this,” Alpers said. “Nobody’s forcing them into doing anything like this. This is the kind of stuff that comes from their heart, and that’s genuine. And it means a lot to them to be able to do some good to help people out.”

Kern said he appreciated what this event said about the CSB+SJU community as a whole.

“I would say the main takeaway for me was just how much of a reflection that this event is for the CSB+SJU community. I think this event really speaks a lot about who we are as Johnnies on this campus, and who we are as a community, and what we value,” Kern said.

Lelwica felt that the people working behind the scenes deserve just as much respect as the volunteers.

“You’ve got to respect those people that dedicate so much. The student-athletes here happened to be on the committee, I happened to be the chair and then we put in effort to make it happen,” Lelwica said. “But there’s a lot of people that do a lot more work to get that to happen, and the respect for them I have is immense. And just also being a part of something that big, that’s bigger than yourself with all these other people was something really cool.”