MARYSVILLE — While most other 10-year-olds wonder what sorts of presents they might be getting for their birthday, Fallyn Gentry devoted her 10th birthday party to giving to others.
Fallyn’s birthday was Friday, March 15, but the party was scheduled for Saturday, March 16, and she was already discussing with her mom Rhesa in late January how they might turn the party into an opportunity to bolster the inventory of the Marysville Community Food Bank.
“We’d sent out our invitations to everyone by early February,” Rhesa Gentry said. “We got about 11 girls, with Fallyn, as well as their adults. The Food Bank had never done anything like this before.”
The birthday party took place at the Food Bank itself, and instead of gifts for Fallyn, guests were asked to bring food items or financial donations, which yielded totals of 459 pound of food and an estimated $100 in cash for the Food Bank.
“It was cool to see how many pounds it went up to as we weighed it,” Fallyn Gentry said. “We were taking guesses. Plus, we all got to go into the big freezer, which was really fun.”
The Gentry birthday party even managed to generate half a dozen bins full of plastic bags in good enough condition for the Food Bank to reuse them.
“It looked a lot different from the first time I was there,” said Fallyn Gentry, who had previously visited the facility during the winter with her mother to drop off some donations. “There were a whole bunch of people there back then, and all the shelves looked really full. It was cool to see the freezer because even when we helped fill it up, it still had a lot of space. It felt like a fun dungeon.”
Rhesa Gentry explained that, as a student at the Northshore Christian Academy, Fallyn has been eager to go on the missions in which her older peers have been able to participate.
“That’s how I knew she would want to help out with something like this,” said Rhesa Gentry, who assisted Fallyn by getting the word out through Facebook and enlisting the aid of a number of adult friends. “I’m so proud of her. I can only hope that this signals that she’ll continue to do positive things.”
