Hundreds of NCSSM students, faculty and staff joined forces with community volunteers in an effort to break the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ record for the largest 24-hour food drive at a single location by a non-charitable organization. They didn’t quite beat the record, but they collected nearly 320,000 lbs of nonperishable food items for the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. Check out the editorial below:

A win-or-win competition

NCSSM Food Drive Committee members take a moment for a photo on the front steps of Watts Hall. NCSSM students worked hard to get community support for their effort to break the world record of more than a half million pounds of non-perishable food items donated in one location in a 24-hour period.

Durham Herald-Sun
March 22, 2010

At the risk of sounding like a broken record — which it wasn’t, sorry to say — we congratulate the students of the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics for collecting 319,990 pounds of food for the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

They — we, since this was a community effort — fell short of the 509,147-pound world record.

But we did not fall short where it counts.

We suspect that there are disappointed high school students on the NCSSM campus today. They’re smart kids, but they’ve got it wrong if they’re anything but happy.

The kids at Science and Math can appreciate numbers, so here are a few:

The food bank distributed nearly 2.3 million pounds of food in Durham last year. In a single day, the food bank received almost 14 percent of last year’s annual donation.

The average person served by the food bank receives 54.9 pounds of food. NCSSM just served 5,827 people.

That’s one-ninth of the people in Durham who live at or below the poverty line.

The volunteers at Saturday’s attempt carried 909 times the weight of the Mini that England’s John Evans balanced on his head in order to earn a world record (heaviest car balanced on a human head).

They gathered 13 times the weight of the world’s largest elephant (24,000) pounds in less time than it took to set the record for balancing on one foot (76 hours, 40 minutes, set by Arulanantham Suresh Joachim).

And we daresay — although we defy the Guinness Book of World Records to measure this — it was as much fun as the largest card game tournament (1,024 players playing Mus for 16 hours in Spain).

This was the best kind of challenge, because it was a win-or-win contest, and we want another crack at it. NCSSM is onto something here: A fun, world-class challenge for this community to do something good for ourselves.

We’d rather do this than, say, set a record for the largest tea party (32,681 quenched record-setters in India). Let’s start planning for 2011.

The Herald Sun ©

See more about the food drive:
>> NCSSM Food Drive promo video
>> Science & Math Record Try Food Drive Hits Final Stretch
>> Watch News-14 Carolina’s pre-coverage
>> World-record chasing food drive organizers take campaign to Net