Allentown Academy Community Service Project: Cans For Pets

Spring has decided to make an appearance here in Pittsburgh and I think I can speak for all of us when I say it's been much appreciated. This means a few things: trees are getting greener, flowers are blooming, but most importantly it means that our annual community service project is underway! Every spring KEYS Service Corps members (such as myself), help implement a service project at their site with help from the kids they serve. This year, our afterschool kids at Grandview Elementary have voted that they would like to help the animals in their community, so we're doing just that.

The Brashear Association is partnering with Pennsylvania Resource Council (PRC) and Alcoa Foundation to work on a project put on by PRC called Cans For Pets. For each empty, aluminum pet food can collected, Alcoa Foundation will donate 5 cents to the Animal Rescue League here in Pittsburgh. This program has already exceeded it's goal of 20,000 cans and has upped that to 100,000 by 2014.

Here's how we're helping: Starting today, for the next couple of weeks, we're going to have two additional collection sites. One at Grandview Elementary School and one at the CLP Pop-up Library, both in Allentown, South Pittsburgh. We will also be accepting donations of full pet food cans that we will donate directly to the Animal Rescue League.

Now on to the fun part: To get the kids more actively involved, they've contributed by helping us make colorful posters to advertise our service project, we've had a visit from the PRC where students were able to help sort through cans, and we even had a visit from the Animal Rescue League who brought along an awesome dog, Survivor, for the kids to play with.

If you live in the Pittsburgh area and would like to help us out, you can also drop off empty or full cans here at The Brashear Association (20th and Sarah Street on the Southside), and we'll make sure they go to the correct location. Happy Spring! 

-Annie