Prince George residents shouldn't be alarmed when the trick-or-treaters coming to their doors are a little older than the average candy seeker.
Many neighbourhoods around the city will be the focus of two student-run food drives bearing the name Trick or Eat.
More than 75 University of Northern B.C. students will be going door-to-door Monday night between 6 and 8 p.m. collecting donations of non-perishable food items for the Salvation Army food banks. College of New Caledonia students will also be out and about between 5 and 8:30 p.m. on Halloween night collecting for their own student-hunger campaign.
"Over the past couple of years, we've seen a record increase in the number of students who cannot afford to buy a meal for themselves," explained CNC Students' Union chairperson Leila Abubaker. The student group started a reciprocity food shelf stocked mostly through donations where people come in and take what they need and leave what they don't. "It helps quite a bit. We have a lot of students who shop our shelves just to get that extra they don't have at the moment."
This will be the second year the students' union is running their campaign, following a successful trial run last Halloween. "We got enough food to stock our shelves for about three to four months," Abubaker said.
CNC students will be wearing grey T-shirts with orange CNCSU logos and carrying their college identification.
They will be collecting in the neighbourhoods around the college and in College Heights.
UNBC Student Life co-ordinater Jennifer Nguyen has introduced Trick or Eat, one of the country's largest youth-led food drives to the university after being a part of campaigns while completing her undergraduate studies at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.
The program is facilitated by Meal Exchange, a registered charity formed to mobilize youth to alleviate hunger in their communities.
"When I moved to Prince George and started my masters, and got this position I realized there wasn't anything on campus at UNBC that did this," Nguyen said.
UNBC students will don costumes and Trick or Eat name tags as they cover 10 five-kilometre routes through College Heights and Westwood. Residents in those neighbourhoods may have already seen pamphlets left in their mailboxes to let them know students are coming.
"There's a been lot of excitement about costumes," Nguyen said, adding there are prizes for best individual and best group costume.
One of the reasons Nguyen said she was so eager to start the Meal Exchange program here is because of its reach.
"This national organization is giving us resources to impact in a larger way than if we did it locally, but all the actual food is going to a local charity," she said.
In addition to donating food, people can also log on to
www.trickoreat.ca and make a monetary donation. For every dollar donated, Meal Exchange is able to provide one meal through one of the local food banks Trick or Eat supports.
As Nguyen explained, anyone who donates food to the students will also receive a thank-you card, providing a web link where they can indicate they donated to Trick or Eat. For every resident that does this, grocery chain Loblaws will donate $10 to Meal Exchange.
"And all the money being raised online, part of it is going to Trick or Eat for administrative costs and the other part is going to Salvation Army's Prince George branch as well, which will give them funds to buy food they may not get enough of through food donations which is really important as well," Nguyen said. "I'm really hoping it will become a tradition."
To date, Meal Exchange has engaged more than 37,000 young people in more than 100 communities and collected more than $3 million worth of food and monetary donations for local hunger-relief agencies.
