This Friday, February 15th at 5:30pm, the students in Ms. Rinder’s fifth block AP Language class will be hosting a student versus teacher basketball game in the main gym, in hopes to raise money and food to donate to the Tin Cup Fund. The Tin Cup Fund (TCF) is a small non-profit organization that Melissa Fox started a little over a year ago. Senior Elizabeth Fox, who is a big part of the Tin Cup Fund at Dominion, described the process of making the TCF what it is today saying, “At the beginning, we started random collections of furniture or baby supplies, but now we do a lot of monetary donations. Often we’ll be able to pay a month’s rent for a family, or hand out grocery store gift cards.”

The idea for the student-teacher basketball game came about when Ms. Rinder assigned her students to come up with a way to battle food insecurity in the area. Rinder described her goals for this assignment as, “[A way] to help students find their voice and to give back not just because they have to, but because they want to.” Rinder also mentioned that she had very little involvement because the goal was to have the event be completely student-led.

Originally the students had debated on organizing a run, but realized that a basketball game would be more logical because of the weather. Junior Brianna Traenkle said of the decision process, “There were many ideas expressed to the class, such as buddies to people in our community, a race, or food drives. The basketball game was the accumulation of all our different ideas and gave each person something to be excited about.”

Junior Kaitlyn Helmich said of the planning process, “It was difficult at first planning  who would do each part but once we got everyone, [for example] who would be publicizing it or who would be talking to other organizations, [and] a group of us would go to Mrs. Fox’s for the Tin Cup Fund. Everyone had their own job which really helped because it was big and we had like twenty people working on it.” When asked why the chose to partner with the Tin Cup Fund Helmich said, “We chose to partner with the Tin Cup Fund because it was local so we wanted to help food insecurity not just in general but help it in our area because we see how it is really profound in our area, so we thought doing it with the tin cup fund would help people in Sterling.”

Brianna Traenkle described the class’ goals saying, “With the basketball game, we hope to provide many donations to the Tin Cup Fund in order to help those around us. Also, one of our main goals is to raise awareness about food insecurity happening within our own neighborhood and Titan community.”