The smell of soup was strong in the Centre Wellington District High School cafeteria on Dec. 9 as the school participated in its first ever “Souper Bowl.”
The event was organized over two weeks by Grade 12 students Morgan Altman, Adia Meyer and Kayla MacMillan, along with the their teacher advisors.
“It was very rushed, lots of running around, early mornings, late nights, but two weeks and we got it going,” Meyer said.
“We’re really happy with how much money we’re making and we’re getting donations, which is awesome so we’re happy.”
Thirty-three teachers made soup or chili that was then sold to students and staff for $5, which included a bowl of soup, a bun and milk donated by Gay Lea Foods Co-operative Limited.
The event raised over $1,000, with half going to the Muscular Dystrophy Association of Canada and the other half going to pediatric brain cancer research.
“There is a student in our school who has a brain tumour at this point,” Altman said.
“So we’re just trying to support her and we’re also trying to support muscular dystrophy so we thought that we’d just combine the two of them and split the profits 50/50.”
The three students organized the “Souper Bowl” for their DECA business club.
“For our DECA business competition we need to do a fundraising event and basically explain to judges in February at our provincial (competition) how we executed the event, the certain things that we did and … we thought that the football theme would be a fun way to boost our school spirit while doing this fundraiser; get the teachers involved, get the students excited about it,” Altman said.
Teacher advisor Brenda Pettifer said the theme may set the team apart.
“We just figured because other teams are competing in the same contest so we wanted to sort of be different,” she said.
“In their category of DECA there’ll be a whole bunch of kids running different community service events so we thought we probably won’t raise the most money of any event, but maybe we can have the best theme, so that’s why we did it.”
If the “Souper Bowl” team is one of the top 10 at the provincial competition in Toronto in February, they could be travelling to Nashville for the international competition.
As for the reason for a soup cook-off, Meyer said, “It is something that’s easy, that everybody can make and a lot of students that we know, a lot of our friends, eat soup at lunch so we though that’s a perfect way to get everybody in there.
“Who doesn’t love soup?”
