SAUGUS — Every Thursday at 6 p.m. on the dot, you can find a group of community members gathered at the MEG building with one goal in mind: ensuring students in need have food during the weekend.
Healthy Students – Healthy Saugus (HS2), a nonprofit that was founded in 2018 by Dennis Gould, is now led by Julie Cicolini, who assumed the role in 2020. The program helps address food insecurity in town, especially for students.
“There’s three piles of bags to fill. One for the Belmonte (STEAM Academy), the Vets (Veterans Early Learning Center), and the Middle High School,” Cicolini said. “We do one carload per school, and then tomorrow morning they get delivered to the schools.”
Cicolini will be taking her trunk full of bags to the Middle High School complex, while two other volunteers will complete the other deliveries.
Cicolini held the job of packing the cars, along with two young brothers, Martin and Vincent Machado. All the other volunteers gathered around a table filled with items such as canned vegetables, snacks, breakfast foods, and lunch items. The volunteers went around the table, item by item, to complete a full bag for a student and then continued with the next.
The system was the picture of efficiency as volunteers filled 130 bags in 14 minutes. Cicolini joked that if volunteers showed up late, they’d often already have all the bags packed.
When asked what her favorite part of the volunteer night is, Cicolini said the answer was twofold.
“It’s giving the kids that are in need the food because they don’t have to worry and their families don’t have to worry. And then it’s the community coming together,” she said.
Cicolini had been a bit worried that the weather would keep some volunteers at home, but walking into the MEG basement, this clearly wasn’t the case. Plenty of people had showed up and got straight to work the minute the clock hit 6 p.m. There were young kids, high school students, and adults all gathering to ensure everything got packed up and ready to roll out to the schools.
“The community is the best part. You get people of all ages and all everything. It brings everybody together,” Cicolini said.
HS2 packs these bags every week, so for those searching for a volunteer opportunity and a chance to do good for the Saugus community, Thursdays at the MEG could be a great place to start.
For those unable to help out on Thursdays, but still want to give back you can Venmo @HS2Saugus. Each bag is valued at $25.
