Looking For The Good Apples

One young woman learns to do good by having fun

As in many high schools, the one Lulu Price attends in San Francisco requires its students to do a certain number of hours of community service each year. “Sometimes we’ll have a service day at the end of the quarter, and the school will organize different things we can do,” Price says. “One is to volunteer at the SF/Marin Food Bank for two or three hours. That’s the one I always do because I really like going there.”

“It’s so simple to go out and do something for your community”

“This last time that I went, there was this big room and it was filled with 24 huge creates of apples, and we were just sorting through them. All these apples were the apple rejects the stores didn’t want because they don’t look pretty, but 95 percent of them were good apples,” Price told Good Turns recently. “My team and I went through three of these huge crates. Some may have little bruises on them, but they’re still good apples.”

Price (standing between two schoolmates in the picture above) has been volunteering at the food bank since fourth grade. “It feels good because you know that you’re actually making a real difference, especially when you hear all the facts,” she says. “I’ve been to the food bank so many times and I’ve heard the same facts over and over again. It’s just crazy how many people are actually going hungry and skipping meals. So it’s a really great thing to do because you know that you’re making a difference, even if it’s a small difference.”

Plus, “it’s a really fun thing to do with your friends,” Price reports. “I’m a really competitive person, so we always compete with the other groups and try to complete the most boxes of apples or the most boxes of rice.”

While she may be competitive, she also likes to help people, she says. “It does make me feel good, and if you’re feeling stressed, it relieves it,” she notes. “I definitely can’t go and do service and work at a food bank or work at a food pantry every day or every week, but incorporating little good deeds into my life is a really important part of it.”

“It’s so simple to go out and do something for your community, even if it’s something as small as working a two-hour shift and packing apples. It’s so worth it, because you feel good afterwards. So I encourage all of the people, everyone, to go out and do something like that, because it’s a really good experience, and it does make you feel good.”

Everyone, Price says. That means you.

Posted October 27, 2017