If her two-year-old daughter’s car seat holds nine cans of soup and a jar of peanut butter (minus the child), how many cereal boxes can she fit into the trunk of her sedan? This is just one of the puzzles educator Martina Voet had to solve in her first year as student government advisor for Rose Hill Middle School in Redmond, Washington. Other dilemmas were less straightforward. How do you convince middle schoolers to put aside popularity contests and work together on a food drive? How do you help them find the nerve to ask their friends to donate?

“It was a little overwhelming,” says Voet, who had been teaching Spanish until this point. “I tried to navigate through all the new information and do the best I could for my students.”

Her new role began in September 2018 and came with teaching a class on leadership. Though she hadn’t taught this subject before, Voet had specifically asked for the assignment. She wanted to do more to build a culture of kindness and empathy among students, to help counteract the influence of social media—where competition and judgment prevail. “The students see how many people follow those online influencers—who aren’t always nice to people—and they mimic that behavior,” she says, explaining her desire to help students realize that they need to support each other in order to thrive as a community.

Voet’s new leadership role also came with a WE service-learning resource with actions designed to spur thinking about local issues, from bullying to children’s rights.

To choose the class’s first campaign, she put it to a vote. The issue of poverty and hunger prevailed. “We live in an area with extremes,” Voet says. “We have a lot of wealthy people in our community, but there are also a lot of homeless people.” She was excited to work on the issue, because it meant helping not only students who were struggling, but also adults trying to provide for their families.

An epic food drive was planned. By mid-November, every hallway at Rose Hill Middle School featured a food drive poster handmade in Voet’s leadership class. Morning announcements included a campaign plug authored by her students. But like many prompts one encounters daily, these reminders soon lost their impact. So Voet urged her students to make the issue personal by reaching out to their networks.

“It was through their immediate friends at first, then through acquaintances,” she says. “Some students aren’t as well off as others, so they knew there would be a lot of people who would benefit from getting the food.”

Within two weeks, the class had collected five times their goal of 100 food items, piled in front of the school secretary’s desk. Voet’s students were amazed at the steady growth of the stack. “They saw the generosity of the community,” she says. While it took a school-wide campaign to raise the donations, there were only Voet, two students and her small silver sedan to deliver it all. Hundreds of cans and boxes had to be packed in, like puzzle pieces.

Her leadership students laughed as she recounted opening the car doors at the drop-off point and watching all the carefully stacked cans tumble out. They were thrilled with the impact, the results of their team effort. “Even the kids known to be jokesters or class clowns had brought in donations. Feeding people was a big enough idea that they took it seriously,” Voet says. “Their leadership skills grew in leaps and bounds during this initiative. I just had to learn to let go.” Voet learned that her students had the vision, fuel and innate compassion to support their community in a meaningful way. All they needed was a ride.