The youth of Vicksburg are making an impact.

On Wednesday, through a partnership with Families First students at St. Aloysius High School created 5,000 easy to prepare rice and beans meals that will be distributed this week to Haven House, United Way, Mountain of Faith Ministries and River City Rescue Mission.

St. Al junior Madalyn Burke organized the event. Everything needed to create the meals from the rice and beans down to the bags and devices to seal them came from The Outreach Program, which is based in Iowa and has five different meals that can be created to help those in need.

“The school sent me to a camp this summer and we did this project in Chicago,” Burke said. “We did 50,000 meals that distributed into the school system. I came home during the summer and I asked Dr. (Buddy) Strickland and Families First if we can do this at St. Al and put it into our community, and they said yes.”

The meals are created to have a shelf life of two years and provide a wholesome meal to a family with little preparation required. Burke said they chose the fortified rice and beans option from The Outreach Program because it was the most diverse and could feed someone lunch or dinner.

“It is amazing, and I am so proud of Madalyn Burke for doing this. She has really gotten all the kids together and gotten the energy flowing,” said Kara Doiron, community outreach coordinator for St. Al.

More positives in Vicksburg this week:

• Monday was designated as World Autism Day and in an effort to reach out locally, the Vicksburg Warren School District works to support students who have been diagnosed with autism. In the VWSD, there are 63 students who have been diagnosed with autism with at least one at each of the district’s 16 schools including the Academy of Innovation and River City Early College.

“I take pride as the director in the fact that we don’t limit students to Beechwood,” VWSD special education director Amy Deason said. “We don’t limit kids to one location. One big thing in Vicksburg is that they like to have their kids in their own community schools. We make sure we have the support available to students where they are in the district.”

• Wednesday, five of the six Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Mississippi attended a meeting that was held at the Alcorn State University-Vicksburg campus. The event was aimed at showing the strengths of each of the schools and fostering continued partnerships between them.

Chris Gilmer, executive director of Alcorn-Vicksburg and SWCCL called the meeting “historic” because it brought nearly all of the HBCUs together in one place to work together. “Cooperation among HBCUs is essential,” Gilmer said. “History cannot be denied, and our institutions have always been underfunded. We have a proven history of producing world-class graduates despite this funding inequity, but we cannot afford to let opportunities for collaboration pass us by.”