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Utica Community Schools Board of Education Treasurer Steven Meyer speaks with students prior to breakfast
UCS school board President Mary Smolenski addresses students and teachers involved in collecting the food.
Kiwanis Club of Utica-Shelby Township President Bryan Padgett and Holiday Food Drive Chairman Rob Peterson speak to those gathered March 5 at Ike's Restaurant.
UTICA — The Kiwanis Club of Utica-Shelby Township celebrated the collection and distribution of approximately 1,500 boxes of food for its 2025 Holiday Food Drive with a thank-you breakfast March 5.
This Kiwanis Club started in the 1950s and focuses on helping kids through fundraising and leadership opportunities. Some of its projects include sponsoring Whispering Woods Kiwanis Park at 11000 21 Mile Road, the StoryWalk project that is also a part of Whispering Woods Kiwanis Park, participating in an adopt-a-family program, donating backpacks filled with supplies for kids, and hosting other fundraising events like the Holiday Food Drive.
“Our four pillars are literacy, hunger, service leadership and mental health, so we try to fit our projects into that,” Kiwanis Club of Utica-Shelby Township President Bryan Padgett said.
For the 2025 Holiday Food Drive, the club distributed 1,500 collection boxes in November to Utica Community Schools including Utica Academy for International Studies; Utica, Henry Ford II, Eisenhower and Stevenson high schools; Bemis and Davis junior high schools; and DeKeyser, Browning, Schuchard, Beacon Tree, Duncan, Plumbrook, Graebner, Beck, Ebeling, Havel, Harvey, Messmore, Collins and Oakbrook elementary schools. From there, the students and staff were able to fill the boxes with food in early December, which were then distributed to St. Ephrem Catholic Church, Trinity Lutheran Church, Heritage Church and Samaritan House.
“It was good,” said Grace Dado, a sixth grader from Collins Elementary. “It wasn’t that hard, but, like, it did feel good doing all that work.”
Some of the students participating in this project were a part of Key Club, which is a high school service leadership group that the Kiwanis Club sponsors, but most of the students just decided to join in.
“We even had one of the elementary schools (Oakbrook), they only collected cereal boxes, and so they collected 1,100 cereal boxes,” Padgett said. “And so they did a domino (chain) throughout the school to help, and I think the elementary students loved it. So, a lot of schools will donate soup, whatever type of typical food distribution, but they did just a cereal drive.”
To celebrate these efforts, the club hosted a thank-you breakfast at Ike’s Restaurant in Sterling Heights with around 80-90 people in attendance, consisting of volunteers from each school and officials from Utica Community Schools. After food was served, officials associated with the club and Utica Community Schools gave speeches on the importance of the project before handing out plaques to further commemorate the students’ efforts.
“So proud to be with all of you this morning and, you know, just hearing some of these comments, the statistics, the history of what we’ve done together as a school community, but (also) as a community at large, it really makes me feel great as a superintendent to hear the great things that you’re doing with students,” Utica Community Schools Superintendent Robert S. Monroe said.
For more information, visit uticashelbykiwanis.org.
