(Each image below is clickable to see it full sized.)
Promotional images announcing the fourth edition of the WPIAL Food & Fund Drive.
In collaboration with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, the WPIAL Food & Fund Drive was a league-wide competition between both the league and the Pittsburgh City League’s member schools to see who could raise the most meals for local communities. Schools were divided into six divisions by enrollment, with the top performing schools in each division earning Community Champion plaudits. Those champions were recognized at the WPIAL’s annual Sportsmanship Summit for the first two years of the initiative, and later honored during the WPIAL Basketball Championships in 2024 and 2025. I oversaw the event on the league’s side of things and worked with my contacts with the Food Bank to promote the drive to our member schools.
Union, the inaugural Community Champion in Class 1A, was recognized at the 2021 WPIAL Sportsmanship Summit.
Shown here at the 2025 WPIAL Basketball Championships, The Ellis School was the 2024 Community Champion in Class 1A, thanks in part to its lower and middle school participation.
The first year in 2021 saw 107,232 meals raised for Western Pennsylvania communities. Participation declined over the next two years, which made me reevaluate the strategy we were using to bring awareness to the event. I realized that by providing information to just athletic directors and principals, we weren’t fully connecting with each member school. I built directories of the WPIAL’s superintendents and communication directors to spread the word more efficiently, so that the event was reaching all levels of a school district and wasn’t just an athletics-focused competition. This change, along with the higher frequency of leaderboard updates and on-site promotion with QR codes at championship venues, helped bring a number of 82,839 total meals raised in the fourth year of the Food & Fund Drive – the drive’s highest yearly amount since 2021.
A leaderboard update on monetary donations for the 2024 WPIAL Food & Fund Drive.
I brought the WPIAL Food & Fund Drive to the regional airwaves by having representatives of Armstrong School District, the 2022 Overall Community Champion, on 93.7 The Fan as part of its “This Hits Different” program, and was fortunate to be interviewed by KDKA-TV in October 2023 to speak about the initiative. In four years, the WPIAL Food & Fund Drive has raised over 325,000 meals for local communities.