Three 18-Year-Olds Had a Choice: Sell It or Give It Away. They Gave It to Westland.
Three recent high school graduates spent six hours hauling thousands of pounds of food out of a home this week.
When they finished, they had another decision to make.
They could try to sell it.
Or they could give it away.
They gave it away.
Booker Ostach graduated from Lakeland High School in White Lake this past spring. Not long after graduation, he and a friend started a junk removal business called Junk Bolt.
About a month ago, his business partner left for college. Ostach, who is also a certified firefighter, stayed home and kept the business going, bringing on two more friends from high school to work alongside him.
This week, a job brought the three 18-year-olds to a home where the owner was preparing to move overseas.
Their assignment was unusual.
The homeowner had accumulated a massive supply of shelf-stable food and needed the storage area completely cleared before selling the house.
According to Ostach, the homeowner estimated the food had originally cost somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000.
And there was a lot of it.
Hundreds of cans and packages of chicken, beef, ham, tuna, sardines, chili, soup, fruits and vegetables. Beans, rice, oats, pasta, flour, potatoes, powdered milk and eggs, cooking oil, coffee and more.
The three friends worked for about six hours getting everything out.
By Ostach's estimate, the bulk items alone weighed more than 6,000 pounds, before even counting hundreds of individual cans and packages.
Then came the part that caught our attention.
The food was theirs to remove. They could have looked for a way to resell some of it and make additional money from the job.
Instead, three guys fresh out of high school started looking for somewhere that could use it.
Their search brought them to Elmwood Blessing Box in Westland.
And that's where the entire load went.
Not a few boxes.
Not whatever was left after taking the valuable stuff.
All of it.
Thousands of pounds of food that had been sitting in storage will now have a chance to end up in the homes of people who need it.
For Ostach, it was simply an opportunity to do something good with what they had been given.
There's also something refreshing about the people behind this story.
These aren't executives from a big company presenting an oversized donation check for a photograph.
They're three 18-year-olds.
They just finished high school. They're working. They're trying to build a small business. One of them is pursuing firefighting while staying local. And when an unexpected opportunity landed in front of them, they decided their community could use it more than they could use the extra money.
That's worth talking about.
Westland spends plenty of time talking about what's going wrong.
Every once in a while, somebody gives us a pretty good reason to talk about what's going right.
This is one of those stories.
