Each year for the past four years, Youth Hockey Hub has partnered with the The Sandwich Project of Minnesota to assemble a group of local hockey teams to make sandwiches for the shelters they help support each week. The Sandwich Project was founded by and run by a group of passionate volunteers who help facilitate the making, the storage and delivery of over 300,000 sandwiches to local homeless and low income food shelves. "The Hockey Helpers event is the only event we sponsor each year," said Sandwich Project Co-Founder and Volunteer Matt Lockhart. "Word of mouth to making sandwiches and to put on this event is all we have ever needed to lean on to make this ministry work."

On Saturday, December 14 forty teams gathered at a church in Edina and made over 6,000 sandwiches. The sandwiches are then stored in a local warehouse where another set of volunteers deliver the frozen sandwiches to local shelters on a weekly basis. The cost to run the Sandwich Project each year costs less one would think - less than $15,000. Mostly due to tireless work by the TSP volunteers. "Without the great crew of volunteers, none of this would be possible," Lockhart went on to say. 

Teams from all over the Twin Cities participated, mostly from nearby suburbs like Edina, Minnetonka and Eden Prairie. But teams came from as far as Woodbury, North St. Paul, and Apple Valley as well. Tom Beattie who is a TSP volunteer from Apple Valley brought his son's team from Eastview again this year. "We really look forward to this event each year, the boys get so much out of it."

As families head into the craziness of the Christmas Holiday, for three hours a group of kids had a chance to reflect for a tiny moment on the true meaning of Christmas.