Annarose Qualls unloads food at the Trinity Baptist Church Food Bank. Food dropped off at this location was donated by Moscow High School students, staff and faculty for her Share Thanksgiving campaign. Her goal is to feed 500 families for Thanksgiving.
Annarose Qualls, a 15-year-old junior at Moscow High School, attended the Christ in Youth Conference in Corvallis, Ore., last summer.
By the end of the program, all participants got the opportunity to open a card, each with a designated challenge inside.
The catch was that opening the card meant an automatic commitment to completing the goal written inside.
From that point on, Qualls was committed to the mission of organizing a food drive and Thanksgiving meal with the goal to feed 500 families.
“Just so you get an idea,” Derek Murphy, director of Real Life on the Palouse, said. “We had other kids who had also done the same thing, they opened the card. They had stuff like, drink only water for the next year and save the money you spent on soda to donate. So, this was definitely almost on another level, and I don’t think there’s anybody more perfect to get that card.”
The task of feeding 500 families for Thanksgiving isn’t easy, so Qualls planned to separate it out into a food drive, and then a feast for 250 people.
The food drive has five schools and eight businesses participating where people can donate any non-perishables until Nov. 20. The five schools participating are Moscow High School, Pullman High School, Moscow Middle School, Logos School and Montrose Christian Academy.
The thanksgiving dinner will take place on Thanksgiving Day. Guests are given a time slot, and will be put into groups with the same time for efficiency. The menu will include everything one would expect from a Thanksgiving feast such as turkey, potatoes, corn, rolls, cranberries and a whole range of pies.
Murphy is involved in helping Qualls in many of the organizational aspects of the project. An active member of the church Qualls is also a part of, Murphy was very familiar with tasks like this one from his previous experiences. He is involved in both hands on volunteering, as well as behind the scenes work. For example, Murphy played a part in creating a promotional video for the food drive that they hope will help spread the word.
“This is a scope of something that one person can’t just do alone,” Murphy said. “And I think Annarose is realizing that more and more each day. But she has done an amazing job spearheading it, and I’m just here to help her in the process.”
At just 15 years old, Qualls has many goals she hopes to achieve in the future. Those include traveling to Africa for volunteer work, teaching English and becoming an author. But, for now, being directly involved in something that will positively impact her community like this is something she said she has being looking forward to for a long time.
“Serving and loving other people is something that’s really important to me,” Qualls said. “This is the first time that I’ve actually started something to help do that. It was kind of perfect when I opened that card, because it was exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been feeling really restless the past year, because I want to be doing more with my life than just doing school, and playing sports. I wanted to be doing something big, doing something hard, doing something to help others, so it was really neat when I got that because I thought like, this is perfect.”
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected]