By Kim J. Harmon

Hold on to your spare change. It will come in handy at your next Newtown High School sporting event.

Interact – formerly the Charity Club now merged with the NHS chapter of Habitat For Humanity – will be taking up a collection for the Action Against Hunger program and it’s goal of $500 will help pay for the sterilization of a village stream in Cambodia.

Interact hopes to meet its goal by January 1, said Tamarra Kemsley, president of charity.

“We want to make this a town thing,” she said, “and rally the town around it. This is money that will go to help people so they can eat and drink clean water.”

Any one of the 20 or so Interact Club members – like Katie Sudbey, club president, or Gavin Newton-Tanzer, chapter president of Habitat For Humanity – will be at most of the Newtown High School home games through the fall and early part of winter looking for donations.

Fans may see them at the ticket tables or in the stands with their tin cans.

According to Kemsley, Interact also plans to undertake a project – selling bracelets to help raise awareness – to help the Save Darfur organization. Darfur is a region in the western Sudan that is suffering from what has been called an “ethnic cleansing.” As many as 400,000 are said to have been killed in the conflict.

So, save that spare change and put it to good use.