Let your light shine: Elle Paveglio

In the spirit of Matthew 5:16, we’re sharing examples of people who live their faith.

Elle Paveglio, a senior at Winnebago Lutheran Academy, Fond du Lac, Wis., saw a need in her community and felt inspired to do something about it.

When Paveglio worked at the Fond du Lac Boys & Girls Club over the summer of 2016, she noticed that some of the children carried white bags home on Fridays. She found out from a coworker that the bags contained food from the Fondy Food Pantry so the kids could eat over the weekend. This experience drove 17-year-old Paveglio to conduct a fundraiser called Tackle School Hunger for the community’s underfed children.

Paveglio set up food drives at four area high schools during their homecoming games. If people brought five food items or $5 to the game, they were entered into a raffle for prizes. Four major donors contributed $1,000 each to the raffle drawings.

In the end, Paveglio was able to drop off more than one thousand food items and $2,000 to the Fondy Food Pantry.

“It was overwhelming how successful the drives were,” she says.

Fondy’s food drive coordinator Lynn Jenkins worked with Paveglio and says she was very organized and ambitious. “You can tell she has a big heart, especially for children,” adds Jenkins.

Paveglio will be attending Northern Illinois University next year, but she hopes to pass on the food drive responsibility to another student.

She says, “Knowing now that I helped more than a thousand people with my food drive, I realize what an amazing opportunity I had.”

Gabriella Moline

 

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Author: Gabriella Moline
Volume 104, Number 2
Issue: February 2017

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