To the editor:
As a proud employee of ACAP, and an active participant of the Cereal Tree Project, it warmed my heart to see the over 1,100 tickets put into our basket by the community, cementing the amazing donation from Scott Carlin and Star City IGA of 250 Cereal Boxes to help some of our Aroostook families. Every child enrolled in an ACAP early care and education program brought home a box of cereal before the holiday break.
The extra cereal boxes are being used to fill the empty shelves in our community cupboards in Houlton and Presque Isle. These cupboards are open to the public. They merely ask you to leave what you can and to take what you need. They have been a huge success, surprising many people, including me. Food insecurity remains a hard issue to overcome for many families in Aroostook. Our small community cupboard in Presque Isle is open all day every day, and even in the winter months, food doesn’t commonly stay long enough to freeze.
The ACAP cereal tree, a way for our agency to help bring more awareness to the food insecurity issues in Aroostook, had an unexpected outcome for me. While standing back and feeling proud of the agency and my coworkers for a job well done, I watched families approach the tree with small children. In three different cases (and I heard this similar story from many employees of ACAP), parents would kneel down with their child and read the sign about “The Giving Tree.” In child-appropriate terms, parents would talk about hunger, need, and the importance of helping others. And then, after sharing this vital and amazing moment with their children, these parents would lift their children up so that the children could put a ticket into the bucket. It was an incredible and inspiring thing to see.
Christmas is the season of giving, but often we say that and don’t take the time to explain what it really means. To the parents I saw, kudos to you. To the parents who did this throughout the amazing weekend, kudos to you. Thank you for passing along this timeless and important message of giving. One of the best explanations I heard given was that sometimes we all need help, and that the families who would receive this cereal, “Maybe it is their turn.” If we create a community where asking for help is supported and encouraged, imagine the County we could be!
Thank you to each and every family who put a ticket into our little tree and helped us prove how powerful Aroostook people can be. When you eat your cereal over the next few weeks, smile and remember that a young family is also eating cereal, perhaps because of the time you took to place a small ticket next to an extraordinary tree.
