River Club youth hold can drive

RIVER CLUB — A glimpse out of a car window five years ago permanently changed Christina Meiser’s perspective on life.

As she and her family drove by the Salvation Army, where homeless men and women were waiting for food, Christina became determined to make a difference for families in need.

Five years later, she’s just as determined. Christina will hold her fifth annual Community Can Drive from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., June 11. River Club residents can leave non-perishable goods they wish to donate on their doorsteps and Christina and her volunteers will stop by to pick them up during that time. A drop-off tent also will be set up at Braden River Elementary School, 6125 River Club Blvd.

Christina’s can drive started five years ago after she and her family left a school open house in Sarasota. As the family drove, they passed the Salvation Army.

“I saw people just sitting there and my dad told me they were homeless and needed food,” Christina says. “I wanted to help.”

Once home, Christina quickly got to work cleaning out the family’s pantry of canned goods to donate to the cause.

But it didn’t seem like enough. So, Christina decided to host a canned food drive in the Sanctuary neighborhood in River Club, where she lived. She and her family distributed flyers to the 160 homes there the week before the event, and then traveled door to door to pick up donations from their neighbors’ doorsteps the day of the drive. That first summer, the Meiser family collected goods four times, gathering more than 1,100 items for the cause.

“It really worked out,” Christina said. “I wanted to do it again.”

Over the last four years, the Meiser family has fine-tuned its collection efforts, streamlining pickups into one-day events and last year adding a drop-off location at Braden River Elementary School.

This year, Christina, with the help of her family and friends, will collect donations throughout the entire River Club community for the first time.

“I would love to have the problem that there’s so much food in the cars we can’t fit people (in them),” Christina’s father Michael Meiser said.

Christina agreed: “It would be cool.”

For more information about the drive, visit http://communitycandrive.webs.com/.

Contact Pam Eubanks at [email protected].