{"id":521620,"date":"2026-11-07T10:02:42","date_gmt":"2026-11-07T10:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/521620\/"},"modified":"2026-11-07T10:02:42","modified_gmt":"2026-11-07T10:02:42","slug":"long-beach-students-collect-food-donations-for-local-soup-kitchen-herald-community-newspapers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/521620\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Beach students collect food donations for local soup kitchen | Herald Community Newspapers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Long Beach Soup Kitchen<\/a> recently benefitted from a swell of support from community students during the \u201cLocal Kids Who Care\u201d initiative. On Nov. 1, more than a dozen students from Long Beach Middle School and Oceanside High School solicited food donations from patrons in front of Key Food on East Park Avenue and Stop & Shop, also on East Park Avenue.<\/p>\n

At Key Food, seventh-graders from Long Beach Middle School<\/a> \u2014 including Vincent Chimienti, Brody Dowler, Billy Munsterman and Cooper Stone \u2014 perched outside the doors, asking shoppers to consider donating products from the \u201cneeded items\u201d list provided by the soup kitchen. They were joined by Oceanside High School seniors Elaina China, Desmond Deacon and Thomas Klodnizski. Sara Dowler, a health teacher at Oceanside High School, was supervising the volunteers.<\/p>\n

The program wasn\u2019t mandated by a school program, club or afterschool activity. The student participation was self-initiated. \u201cIt\u2019s just students from the community volunteering for the soup kitchen,\u201d Dowler explained.<\/p>\n

Farther down the road, at Stop & Shop, the Long Beach Soup Kitchen was also receiving support from the South Shore Figure Skating Team \u2014 a collective of young women from Rockville Centre, Oceanside, Freeport and Bellmore\/Merrick high schools, who participate in regional figure skating competitions.<\/p>\n

Denise Klodzinski, a Special Education teacher at Oceanside High School<\/a>, supervised the skating team. \u201cI work with Sara Dowler at the high school. She asked if [the team] was looking for any volunteer experience,\u201d Klodzinski explained. \u201cMy son is over at the other site, so I brought my daughter and her team here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day\u2019s food donations overloaded multiple cars with cereal, cooking oil, pasta, broth and more kitchen staples. \u201cWe have a food pantry twice a week where people can come and shop,\u201d explained Ron Schoen, community liaison for the kitchen. And they stay by the front window and they say, \u201cThat\u2019s Mondays and Thursdays. Monday through Saturday, we give out soup, a main meal, a sandwich.\u201d The Long Beach Soup Kitchen has served the area since 1983 and has provided more than 20,000 meals in 2026 alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Long Beach Soup Kitchen recently benefitted from a swell of support from community students during the \u201cLocal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[199604,199603,131,199605,133,132,43088,199602],"class_list":["post-521620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-food-donation-drive","tag-local-kids-who-care","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-community-service","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-long-beach-soup-kitchen","tag-long-beach-student-volunteers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}