Puyallup High School’s DECA donated Birthday boxes Jan. 11 to the Puyallup Food Bank.
DECA adviser, Kimberlie Root, says that the donation drive took about a month, but admits that the club didn’t advertise it well nor get a lot of teachers to buy in.
“But we had about four classes that competed against each other,” Root said. “And then we had in-house, our DECA classes and our marketing classes compete against each other. With that, we were able to get almost everything we needed to put the boxes together.”
Root says that DECA did use a little bit of their budget to buy white boxes and ribbon. DECA students then decorated the outside of the boxes and filled them.
Then club members put either purple or gold ribbons on them with hot glue guns and packed them all up in the cars and then took them to the Puyallup Food Bank.
These Birthday boxes were filled with cake mix, frosting, juice boxes, candy small toys, candles, plates, napkins, balloons and streamers. Puyallup High School senior and Chapter President, Danielle Poulin, is the Washington State Area Seven President and Vice-President of Career Development. She says the project had its ups and downs, but the group learned a lot from doing it.
“There’s always some good and bad points. One of the things we talked about in the project is what worked well and what didn’t work well,” Poulin said. “Advertising is one of the major parts of getting all of these donations, so working with different classrooms to make sure we could meet our goals was really essential.”
Poulin says that outside forces also impacted the group’s ability to complete the donation drive.
“What didn’t work so well was all of the different things that kind of fell on top of us,” Poulin said. “Our classroom got flooded during the time and there was a snowstorm while we were about to deliver and all these other things, but through that we learned about adversity and making sure that we were still able to complete our project.”
As Chapter President, Poulin takes care of all the volunteering for her DECA Chapter. Poulin said she likes being able to make a positive impact. She talked about why DECA decided to make these Birthday boxes.
“Our DECA chapter decided to make these boxes because during COVID-19 there was a lot of families that were impacted financially, especially like the last two years, there was a lot of just surviving off the basic needs and we believe that everybody deserves more than the basic necessities of life. We all deserve happiness, so we wanted to provide something more than the basic necessities,” Poulin said.
DECA is a program for marketing students, it gives students hands-on experience in marketing and business. The DECA marketing classes runs “The Wall” and “The Viking Blend” during lunch along with participating in various competitions. Root talked about her responsibility as the DECA adviser.
“The responsibility [for the different businesses] falls on my Marketing Three students. My responsibility is mainly just checking in and making sure that if they have any questions or problems that I can answer, providing space for them to put their things, maybe helping communicate with other teachers. But the majority of the responsibility lies solely on the two DECA officers,” said Root.
