Take the Cake: Student’s gift helps other students celebrate

SANFORD, N.C. —  To celebrate his upcoming 17th Birthday, Tanner Reichel came up with a plan to help other people celebrate theirs. 

Reichel, a student at Central Carolina Academy and CCCC, collected donations to create kits, each filled with supplies needed to bake a cake, plus a few extra celebratory items. 

He then gave those kits, 35 in total, to the food pantry on CCCC’s campus in Sanford. 

The Ruby McSwain Cougar Markets, located on CCCC’s Chatham, Harnett, and Lee main campuses, are open to all currently enrolled students. These pantries provide free food items and other necessities, like toiletries, for those in need. 

The Cougar Markets are funded through the CCCC Foundation, with support from generous donors who believe in helping students succeed. The foundation welcomes and relies on donations to keep the Cougar Markets stocked and accessible.

During a recent visit following his gift, Reichel met a group of fellow students who were touring the pantry with their instructor. 

April Raines, a CCCC administrator with oversight over the pantry, showed them around, and asked Reichel to introduce himself and the kits. 

“For my birthday, I just wanted to share it with other people,” he told them, shortly before Raines successfully encouraged one of the students to take a kit home. 

“Any time you come in, we welcome you with open arms,” she told them as they left. 

Raines said she thought Reichel’s concept for the kits was a brilliant idea, especially in how he put them together. Each kit came packed in its own aluminum baking pan, with a bottle of oil or with soda, which can be used as a replacement for oil and eggs. 

“For our first-gen students, that’s the first thing they are thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m not going to be able to even make this cake, because I don’t have the ingredients,’” she said. 

Reichel said that when he was brainstorming about what he might do for a service project for National Honor Society, he started thinking about collecting food. Then he thought about his birthday, which made him think of birthday cakes. 

“Since I will be able to, I want the chance for someone else to be able to celebrate as well,” he said, pointing out that the cake kits could also be used for other kinds of celebrations.

The most challenging parts of the project, he said, were figuring out which supplies he needed, gathering donations, and keeping track of how much of any one item he’d collected, to get a sense of whether he needed to buy more or get more donations. He used some of his own money to get the kits completed, he said. 

Reichel was happy to see that, a few days after delivering the kits, a significant portion had already been taken.

“I know that there could be a point where anyone really could be in that situation where they rely on the food banks,” he said.