URBANA — On Friday, more than 20 Uni students will gather to trick-or-treat together — not for candy, but for canned goods.

The second Halloween Hunger Drive, organized by Students for a Better World, will collect canned food to donate to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank, which will redistribute the items to local food pantries and soup kitchens, helping to relieve hunger in the greater East Central Illinois area.

S4BW hopes to do even better than last year, when about 20 students collected an estimated 300 cans. They'll be trick-or-treating just off-campus in the Hessel Park neighborhood of Champaign between 6 and 8 p.m., and they invite anyone wanting to help to come along.

You don't have to be an S4BW member to participate. Sophomore Buck Walsh, one of last year's volunteers, strongly recommends taking part.

"Basically, you walk around and talk with your friends for two hours," he said. "And you're helping out your community. And they [the local residents] give you candy anyway, so it's not like you're missing trick-or-treating either!"

The Halloween Hunger Drive is a relatively new tradition at Uni, started only last year by then-senior Rachel Hurley after a leadership summer camp she had attended named it as an easy community activity to organize.

She brought the idea before S4BW, which agreed to sponsor the project alongside the group's other fundraisers and drives, and the process went even smoother than imagined.

The week before Halloween, fliers explaining the drive were distributed to houses in the "state street" area of Urbana, so when the students arrived on Halloween, almost every house had something to give.

Trick-or-treating in small groups, the students managed to cover almost six streets: McCullough, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, California, and Illinois.

Because each group had a car to load their cans into, they managed to collect much more food than they could have carried themselves.

Senior Rachel Hyman, who helped organize last year's drive with Hurley, said they collected enough cans to fill almost the entire Counseling Resource Center; all of the items were donated to the Food Bank.

Hyman is organizing this year's drive as well. To volunteer, contact her at rhyman2-at-uni.illinois.edu. Drivers are especially appreciated.

"It's a great way to help out, and it's only two hours," Hyman said. "If you're not planning on doing anything else, you should definitely come."