Dec. 12, 2019 -- Oxford Elementary School has been the recipient of much generosity and kindness from across the district and community and this year, they wanted to give back. So the building organized a turkey and food drive for Thanksgiving to benefit families from across the district. 

Organized by Oxford’s social work intern, Brittany Rabb, the drive was an enormous success collecting enough turkeys and canned foods for 34 families from eight different schools. A total of 34 turkeys were donated by Oxford staff, parents and community members, district staff and alumni, Church of the Saviour, and City Church CLE. 

Students competed in the canned food drive for a pizza party or tickets to the staff-student basketball game, donating 430 cans. Melissa Schwartz’s kindergarten class handily won the pizza party by bringing in a total of 121 cans—that’s a lot of heavy backpacks for 5-year olds!

It should come as no surprise that Ms. Rabb, who is finishing her Masters degree at the Case Western Reserve University, is also a graduate of CH-UH schools and a former Oxford Elementary student. Her experience growing up in Cleveland Heights taught her “the value of community. Through hard times that I experienced growing up, the Heights community was always there for me. Because of this, I jumped at the opportunity to give back to the community that raised, protected, and educated me.” 

Not only did Rabb organize the drive at Oxford, she also coordinated with social workers in eight district buildings for help identifying the families who would most benefit from a Thanksgiving dinner donation. She boxed the various canned goods, and worked with volunteers from City Church CLE who donated use of their vans to deliver the dinners across the community. Fellow Heights alumna Juliana Sorero, also class of 2015, volunteered her time home from Delaware where she works as a chemical engineer, to help fill and deliver boxes on the Monday before Thanksgiving.

Matt Moore, from City Church CLE, said, "It was a joy participating in the Thanksgiving food drive. It can be hard to connect with neighbors in meaningful ways, especially when our community can seem so be divided by politics, economics, prejudice, distractions, etc. Serving each other can be a bridge where we meet across these divisions; offering what we have, receiving what we lack."

Oxford’s social worker Edie Fiala, who supervises Ms. Rabb’s internship, was a huge support and was “thoroughly impressed with how well Brittany organized this initiative.”

According to Ms. Rabb, the inspiration behind this drive was really quite simple: “The school’s theme this year is kindness, and I wanted to utilize my knowledge of the community and role as a school social work intern to help Oxford’s students demonstrate kindness to the entire Cleveland Heights-University Heights community.”