With a little help from their friends, student teams from 13 area schools may surpass the amount of food generated from the 2014 CANstruction event. Last year’s event generated 75,500 pounds of food. That amount includes the canned food used in building the structures and in the CANstruction voting.

Glenbrook Square hosts this unique event and visitors to the mall may vote for their favorite structure by donating a can of food. The schools plan to use 73,350 pounds of food in their structures. Voting in this year’s competition should help surpass the total amount of pounds generated from the 2014 competition.

CANstruction is sponsored by Community Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Indiana, Inc. The structure receiving the most votes will earn $1000 from Exelis, the presenting sponsor of CANstruction 2015.

Students begin the building process Friday morning, April 17 and will complete the structures by late afternoon. The amount of cans involved in each structure range from 2500 cans to 12,000 cans. A panel of judges will review each structure Saturday morning, April 18. The structures remain on display at Glenbrook for one week.

Area high schools involved in this year’s competition include DeKalb, Canterbury, New Haven, North Side, Concordia, Carroll, Blackhawk, Leo, and Wayne New Tech. Also competing are Towles New Tech Middle School and St. Elizabeth’s Middle School.

Following completion of the event, all canned food items are collected by Community Harvest and eventually distributed for hunger relief activities in Adams, Allen, DeKalb, Huntington, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, Whitley and Wells counties. Only three American cities—Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas—had CANstruction events that generated more pounds of food than Fort Wayne.