Spreading Hope for the Hungry with Peanut Butter and Jelly

Notre Dame Academy students are making a difference in our community one peanut butter and jelly sandwich at a time. While NDA students perform thousands of hours of service throughout the year, during the cold winter months, they focus on ways to combat poverty, homelessness, and especially hunger. 

Recently the students decided that the best recipe for successful service consisted of only a couple of key ingredients: peanut butter and jelly. Each grade level brought in one item as their offering at NDA’s Thanksgiving Prayer Service. Seniors and juniors donated loaves of bread, sophomores collected jars of peanut butter, freshman brought in jelly, and  NDA faculty and staff donated plastic bags. Together they had everything they needed for the “PB&J at NDA” project.

Thinking that a few more hands would be beneficial, Notre Dame Academy invited local eighth graders to join the cause. Nearly 30 students from Blessed Sacrament, St. Agnes, St. Joseph in Crescent Springs, and Turkeyfoot came eager to help and brought water bottles and bagged snacks along with them to make the meals complete. The grade school students and NDA Pandas worked together making sandwiches until they ran out of supplies. When they finished, they had 900 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that were delivered to five local agencies including: Welcome House, the Notre Dame Urban Education Center, the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky, St. Bernard’s Food Pantry, and Fairhaven Rescue Mission. 

With just a few simple ingredients, students were able to spread hope and feed the hungry of our community. Notre Dame Academy’s students were very appreciative of their eighth grade volunteers who made the job a bit easier and hopefully gained a bit of insight from the NDA students into what it means to make a difference in the world.