High school student organizes Thanksgiving dinner for Palouse community for second year in a row
Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks and share a meal in the company of others, which is why 16-year-old Annarose Qualls said she is organizing the second year of Share Thanksgiving, a community dinner to feed hundreds of people in need.
Annarose Qualls
“I’m really excited for this year,” Qualls said. “I think it will be great and so much fun, and it’s awesome having all these people come together to make it happen.”
The Share Thanksgiving dinner will take place Wednesday, Nov. 26, at the 1912 Center. There will be four different meal times at 4 p.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Qualls said the dinner is a traditional-style turkey dinner. She will receive a helping hand from Real Life on the Palouse, a local church she and her family attends, as well as volunteers from other local churches in the area.
Derek Murphy, connections coach for Real Life, said he and his organization are helping Qualls with ideas for the dinner, outreach efforts and volunteer recruitment.
“We are just excited about what she is doing and want to partner with her to help make the event successful,” Murphy said.
Murphy said he witnessed Qualls’ effort in organizing the event last year, noticing how she spent hundreds of hours planning the logistics of the dinner.
Qualls said she is not nearly as nervous as she was last year in planning the Thanksgiving dinner because of the lessons she learned in planning last years’. Where about 400 people came to the dinner, and in combination with a food drive she led, a total of 630 families were fed for Thanksgiving. This year, she said she’s teaming up with the Palouse Cares food drive so she can focus more on the dinner event.
Qualls said she came up with the idea after attending a summer program called the Christ in Youth Conference in Corvallis, Oregon, where she was challenged to feed 500 families for Thanksgiving last year and ended up doing so in Moscow.
“It was just an incredible experience,” Qualls said. “It was very life changing and it changed me in a lot of ways. I learned a lot through it and built relationships and it was really cool to see how something like that is really achievable.”
Qualls said one of the most valuable takeaways from coordinating the event was seeing the goodness in people. She said she discovered she knows many individuals with a wide range of skills who banded together and to help her along the way — and whenever anything went wrong, she said she was amazed how God would come through and often make things even better.
“It’s an amazing, beautiful celebration,” she said.
Qualls is a senior at Moscow High School and plans to attend the University of Idaho. As the middle child of 11, Qualls said she loves being around people. Her family moved to Moscow from Colorado when she was 1 year old and she was homeschooled most of her life until her sophomore year.
“I love being able to go to school and be with like 800 other people every day,” Qualls said.
While she said she is not sure of what kind of career she wants yet, she knows she wants to write. She said she also loves foreign languages and countries and she may decide to become a translator for a foreign diplomat or ambassador.
“There are all sorts of possibilities and I’m excited to see what happens with my life,” she said.
Mary Malone can be reached at [email protected]