Students at Saint Monica Elementary School in NDG had some special guests Tuesday morning for a holiday event.
Besides the person dressed as Santa Claus, Natalie and Adrian Bercovici of the Generations Foundations charity arrived to help distribute gifts to the students during their breakfast.
The couple started Generations Foundations 20 years ago after Adrian worked for years with homeless people. With the organization, he and Natalie want to help prevent homelessness by giving kids enough to eat to help them learn in school.
“I don’t ever want any one of these kids to be homeless,” Adrian, the foundation’s executive director, told Global News. “More opportunities they have to have a good meal, to be in school, to study, there’s every likelihood that they’ll never end up on the street.”
The foundation now supports breakfast programs in 130 schools.
“That’s 9,000 kids, and it’s all free,” Adrian explained. “We do not charge one cent, we do not get any government help, we manage ourselves.”
He added that all of it is done with help from various supermarkets and other businesses.
This year, Saint Monica was added to the list of schools they support. The school already had a breakfast program started by former teacher Avice Roberts-Joseph.
“To make sure our kids are learning, they need to be fed,” Roberts-Joseph stressed. “So this is one of my pet hobbies.”
With Generations’ involvement this year, the school’s program has grown.
“When we started the breakfast program, we started with 35 children,” said Roberts-Joseph. “Now, this year, we have 145 children registered — not because parents can’t afford to feed their children, but because they work.”
Teachers say having a good meal before classes helps prepare the students to learn, but doing so also helps with socialization skills, since they get to meet new students during the meals.
For the holiday breakfast, all 300-plus students participated, each one getting a personal gift wrapped by volunteers. With all this special attention, Adrian and Natalie hope that they are helping to build a bright future for the students.