Rotaract Club Serves Community at Super Bowl Soup Drive

Concordia’s Rotaract chapter collected groceries for the Blue Valley Food Pantry before the Super Bowl on Feb. 3. Photo by Sonja Brandt.

By Morgan Consier

Since their organization last March, Concordia’s Rotaract club has been looking for ways to serve the Seward community. On Sunday, Feb. 3, they did just that by running a food drive for non-perishable items at Walmart during the pregame shopping hours.

Club president, junior Jacob Cornelio, said the goal of the club is to see how they can help people around them.

“With that as our main focus we try and come up with activities to get people involved in the community and also raise awareness too,” Cornelio said.

Rotaract has worked with the local Rotary chapter to get the club started, including organizing events around Seward.

This semester, the two groups worked together to put on the soup drive for the Blue Valley Food Pantry in Seward. Rotaract has been doing the drive for almost 20 years, but this year the Rotaract Club volunteered to organize the drive.

Student Rotaract members laugh with faculty club sponsor, Professor Sommerfeld. Photo by Sonja Brandt.

“As a club, we thought it would be something great to take over and some younger energy,” Cornelio said.

Cornelio said for the club’s first time doing the drive, they had a great turn out, collected 346 pounds of food and $103 donated by both members of the Seward community and Concordia students.

“The most impressive part was seeing the amount of young people donating most of the food,” Cornelio said.

Rotaract partners with Student Committee for Diversity and Inclusion to support each other’s events. They meet on the first and third Sundays of each month and are ready to accept any new members.

“Something that I say every meeting is to bring new people and new ideas because we are open to anything,” Cornelio. “As long as the main goal is helping the community, we will do our best to get people there.”