SPARK's Facebook Page

CHICAGO - The UIC Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) has been doing good in the Chicago area this holiday season. SAAC created a program called SPARK (Students Performing Acts of Random Kindness) to help feed the city's homeless.

Led by Mitch Granger of the men's tennis team, the group has held two events where they prepared meals for the homeless. In their most recent event, SPARK recruited 19 UIC students to bag lunches that fed 25 homeless men and women. The student-athlete organization will continue handing out bagged lunches to the homeless every week for the rest of the year.

SPARK has also partnered with the Chicago Church of Christ in collecting winter clothes for a coat drive. The group is currently collecting coats, hats and gloves for the drive, which will be held on Dec. 27 at a homeless shelter near campus.

"Although we are a newly formed organization, I am very excited with what we have been able to accomplish so far," said Granger, a junior at UIC. "We have a great group of students committed to making a difference and I think the potential for this group is sky high."  

"We decided early on that we were not going to be an organization that falls short of their goals,” Granger continued. “We want to be an organization that can ‘talk the talk and walk the walk’. I am very confident we will continue to do that."