“We all had a small idea and we made it pretty big,” Sedona Red Rock High School student Estefani Arce-Cruz said, explaining how seven Sedona-Oak Creek School District students came together to raise over $700 for Hope House of Sedona, a nonprofit that shelters homeless students.

The students of Katharine Hill’s 12th-grade government class at SRRHS have been taking issues that matter to them personally, researching their topics and finding a course of action to address those issues. For Erick Guerra, Omar Villalpando, Arely Lopez, Estefani Arce-Cruz, Jazmin Ruiz, Laura Guerra and Lorena Flores, that meant Nutella pancakes, green chile tamales, hot cocoa and bracelets. The group held a bake sale that raised $713 for the Hope House of Sedona and handed over the check on Monday, Dec. 18.

“I’m just very impressed with how motivated these students are. The students are able to go out into the community to earn money for a good cause,” Hope House treasurer Holly Johnson said. “It just gives me faith in the younger generation of how much they work for things and how they like to give their time and volunteering.”

“The mission of Hope House of Sedona is to provide temporary transitional housing for children and their families in Sedona who find themselves without a permanent home,” the organization wrote to the students “With your help, we were able to serve several families with children over the past year and look forward to serving many more in the future.”

During the spring, SOCSD was serving 30 students that are classified as homeless through the federal government’s McKinney-Vento program, and were seeing students on the program staying homeless for a longer period of time. SOCSD currently enrolls 19 homeless and foster children.

“[SOCSD] has anywhere between 15 to 30 homeless students at any given time,” Johnson said. “Over the last year we’ve had three families that have school-aged kids referred to us.”

This is the second time Hope House has received financial donations from SOCSD students. Last year, the Interact Club affiliated with the Rotary Club of Sedona Village also raised money for the local nonprofit.

“The way this came about is very interesting,” Johnson said. Arce-Cruz contacted her and said that she was going to do a project for school. “She chose Hope House and wanted to know how she could help. I told her that the Interact Club last year did a fundraiser for us last year and [Arce- Cruz] said, ‘Oh, that sounds fun.’”

“We all had the same idea for the project,” Arce-Cruz said. “We all wanted to help out with the homeless people in the community. So we searched up a few organizations online, and Hope House happened to be the most helpful, and they gave us plenty of ideas … Then we decided that we were going to sell food, like hot chocolate, and a whole bunch more. Then we got together in [Omar Villalpando’s] house to put it all together. Then we spoke to our friends and family. And they decided to join and help us out.

“We’ve been in contact with Hope House throughout the whole process. They’re very proud of us. Overall, it was a really fun learning experience and it was fun working with the whole team.”

Arce-Cruz said learning that some of the group’s classmates being homeless and assisted by Hope House inspired them to work even harder on the project.

“Especially in this type of weather, since it’s really cold outside and we think it’s very important that small children get their meals every day, and they have somewhere safe to sleep,” Arce-Cruz said.

Villalpando added that the project went smoothly, especially after the group divided up the work among themselves, and that he sees himself continuing to help people after graduation.

“After high school I see myself going into the medical field. I’m going to go get my BSN at Maricopa Community College and from there, I’m going to work for a while and then go back to school for my nurse practitioners,” Villalpando said.

“It was enormously gratifying to see them come together as a team,” Hill said. “They really took the idea and put it together and everybody added their different pieces to it. The more they learned about Hope House and what they were doing, the more passionate they got about putting this fundraiser together and they were very organized. They worked very well as a team and it was enormously impressive to see what they were able to accomplish here at the school.”