116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
PHOTOS: Corridor 'Canstruction' fills mall With cans
CEDAR RAPIDS – Instead of sleeping in on a sunny Saturday morning, dozens of adults and children worked at Lindale Mall, stacking and taping endless cans to help others.
“I got here at six,” said Matt Krieger, chair for the Corridor Canstruction event.
He was one of the first but he wasn't alone for long.
Fourteen different teams work on various “can creations”, including a whale made of soup and bottled water that even shot bubbles into the air on command. The whale even came with nutritional “information”: a total of 393,558 calories if you add all the cans up.
“It took a lot of teamwork to do it,” said Michael Salazar, 13, a student at South East Junior High School in Iowa City. “Otherwise, we would have never gotten done in time.” Salazar's team put on one of the more impressive showings, a seven-foot-tall “Oscar the Grouch” theme complete with cans of tuna, peas and soup.
Ethan Jorgensen, 13, of North Liberty said that his team's offering, a sloth made out of cans of soup and beans, is technically correct.
“We kept measuring and we even went to the Museum of Natural History (in Iowa City), measuring the sloth there and we built it as close to that scale as possible.” Jorgensen said much of the money for the $1,165.18 cost of the sloth came from “penny wars” at his school, North Central Junior High. The final tally for the sloth: 1,949.61 pounds.
While the exhibits each come from a different inspiration, the food itself is intended for the same purpose. HACAP will take the cans, estimated at about 22,000 pounds worth, from Lindale Mall to re-distribute throughout its network in Johnson and Linn Counties.
“The event is about raising awareness about hunger in the area,” said Krieger. “They can be inspired by what they see. The need is out there.”
Krieger said he was also pleased that corporate groups joined the many student organizations to craft objects made out of cans.
“It was out way to help the community,” said Melissa Tiedemann of Stanley Consultants in Coralville. “Times are tough and HACAP is strapped right now.”
-Chris Earl, KCRG-TV9 News
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Courtney Peckosh, 10, watches as Emmanuel Hidalgo-Wohlleben, 11, and Peter Greubel, 11, work with other students from Nixon and Grant Wood Elementary's PACT groups to create Mount Canolympus during Canstruction, the creation of structures out of canned foods, at Lindale Mall on the northeast side of Cedar Rapids on Saturday, April 10, 2010. Between student groups and professional groups, there were fourteen total in the fifth annual charity competition that collected about 22,000 pounds of food. The structures will be on display at Lindale until April 17, and then all food and proceeds will be taken over by HACAP who will distribute the items to local organizations and food pantries. (Julie Koehn/The Gazette)
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