Sophia Gonzalez
Florida Southern College’s Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity (AGR) hosted a hurricane relief food drive following Dorian’s landfall in the Bahamas as a Category 5 hurricane. They collected canned food items, cases of water and boxes of soap, which they delivered to the Lakeland Linder International Airport on Sept. 11, in an effort to send supplies to people in the Bahamas affected by the hurricane.
AGR asked people to drop off supplies at an on-campus house located on Frank Lloyd Wright Way. Although, AGR members don’t know the exact amount of items that they collected, their front porch was stacked full of water bottle cases, which blocked the view of the front door, and the living room of the house was also full of supplies, making it hard to walk around the house.
“It was just kind of an idea we came up with last minute,” AGR’s Treasurer Bennet Rodriguez, who lives at the on-campus house, said. “We didn’t see anyone else from the school who was doing it, so we did it.”
AGR’s philanthropy is the Talbot’s House, so this food drive isn’t related to their philanthropy, but according to Rodriguez, AGR is thinking about hosting events similar to this one every year.
“I’m from Fort Lauderdale, so I do know a lot of people who are from the Bahamas, who travel to the Bahamas,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of my friends have gone over to help out people over there, so I see their snapchats and their instagrams and it’s wrecked over there.”