JACKSON TWP — For more than 55 years, Light of Life Rescue Mission on Pittsburgh's North Side has been a lifeline for the city's poor, needy and homeless.

When that demand becomes overwhelming, the mission tugs on a lifeline of its own — Seneca Valley Middle School.

For nearly a decade, more than 100 seventh graders assigned to the Cougars, one of three teaching teams at the middle school, have volunteered time and energy at the mission and in the classroom, said Lisa Tyson, Cougars reading teacher.

In 1999, Tyson's first year at the school, team teachers pitched in to buy a turkey for the mission's Thanksgiving dinner.

Since then, twice a month two team teachers, along with five students and their parents, volunteer to serve dinner at the mission, Tyson said.

"Now it has blossomed into this wonderful committed working relationship with them that when they need something they let us know what it is," she said.

Students have participated in a Steelers tailgate party at the mission, as well as walks to raise money for autism and the homeless.

Over the past five years the team donated $2,500 cash, or about $500 each year, Tyson said.

Last year the team bought the mission a new television, and for the past two years box trucks have been filled with coats for men, women and children.

In May the request was for some time off, Tyson said.

So about 10 students and their parents spent Friday packing 150 brown bag lunches so mission workers could have the weekend off.

Each bag was packed with sandwiches, chips, fruit, drinks and dessert.

The team's 135 students and teachers raised $500 in about a week to buy the food, Tyson said, including students emptying their pockets for the collection.

Lunch bags and bottled water were donated by the Giant Eagle in Seven Fields.

"I think it'll be really great," said Sarah Huber, 13, of the lunch project.

Huber of Cranberry Township also has been a dinner-serving volunteer at the mission.

The best part, she said, is "whenever you get the good feeling after you leave there."

Derek Finney, 13, also of Cranberry, said he feels rewarded after putting food on the table at the mission for people who need it.

"I thought it would be a little worse than it was," he said, but everyone at the mission is nice.

Tyson said often students are surprised by what they see at the mission, like people talking on cell phones in line for a free meal.

"They (students) don't understand how they can have a cell phone but not a house," she said.

Students must take a parent on the trip to volunteer, and the experience is often eye-opening for both, Tyson said.

"A lot of parents have never gone and they don't know what to expect either," she said.

Most of all, Tyson said she hopes students take away knowledge of the world beyond them, and that the value of giving is more rewarding than getting.

The ideas seem to be working as former Cougars team members return to the mission year after year.

"When the kids have left the middle school they've taken it with them," she said. "It's mushroomed into this thing that has a life of its own now."

This year swim team and club members collected hundreds of pairs of flip-flops at the mission's request, the first non-Cougars organization to do so.

"This is something now that a lot of different organizations are now getting involved in," Tyson said.

"You hear so many people today say with teenagers it's all about them they're so selfish," she said.

Serving dinner at the mission is a steppingstone for her students to redeem themselves from that stereotype, she said.

"That one night they're thinking about someone besides themselves, and proving they can."