Great Stories
Montana Campus Corps:
College Students Meeting Critical Community Needs
250 Pounds of Cheerios and an Ounce of Service Goes a Long Way by Piper Platte

While I worked many hours as a student nurse in various departments at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital and at sites around the community and State of Montana, my favorite experience inspired by Americorps was my volunteer afternoon at the Bozeman Food Bank. As part of the Americorps program, I had to recruit two non-Americorps people to join me in a service project. I convinced two good friends to work for four hours at the Food Bank just prior to Thanksgiving. The Food Bank was fascinating! The most memorable experience was decanting a 250-pound box of Cheerios into quart-sized plastic bags. I had NEVER in my life seen SO many Cheerios. The box was literally the size of a human ball bin you dive into at the circus or Chucky Cheese! Every time we went to fill our bowl up from the large box, we had to be careful not to fall in and disappear into a vat of Cheerios. While working on this project (which took most of the four hours), a family with three kids came to assist in our gigantic task. Working together to decant the Cheerios, we began talking to the kids and learned that their parents had created a very intriguing service/chore program that they were in the process of partaking in. The deal was that the kids had to do chores for an allowance and that half of their earnings had to be designated to a charity of their choice. In addition, as part of their service to that charity, they had to serve a certain number of monthly volunteer hours. The kids were fulfilling their volunteer hours this month at the food bank. I loved this idea for inspiring kids at a young age to be service oriented! It also took the selfishness out of earning an allowance and put some fun into chores because the kids were having a blast amongst the Cheerios.

We also helped load approximately 2,500 pints of whipping cream into the fridge as well as deliver monthly rations of food to the Bozeman Senior Center. The four hours flew by and one of my friends enjoyed her experience so much that she has since been back to volunteer at the food bank three times. Not only that . . . but I told two other friends about how great our experience was and sharing my stories inspired them each to serve three days as well. From this experience, I learned that the web of good will and service can and should be cast wide. I look forward to graduating from nursing school and having a little more free time in my schedule so I can return to the food bank and help out some more!


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