Although we should be doing community service projects throughout the year, many troops naturally choose to do one during the holiday season. Here are some ideas for you to try.
Photo from Pixabay
Holiday Mail for Soldiers This is sponsored by The Red Cross
Make cards for Thanksgiving, Chanukah and Christmas for your local Meals on Wheels program
Adopt a local family and collect food and/or gifts for a holiday meal
“Thanksgiving in a Bag” This is a take on the Girl Scout “Birthday in a Bag” program. Have each girl bring in a box of stuffing, canned yams, canned gravy, boxed potatoes and brownie mix. Fill a bag and make a card to put into it.
If you do not want to ask each girl to bring in so much, assign each girl one thing to bring, put it in a bag with a gift card to a local supermarket and donate it to a local organization.
Call the local hospital and see if there is anything your troop can collect to help new families that are in need.
Call your local animal shelter and see what items they need so the girls can collect them.
Pay a visit to your local Ronald McDonald House and bake cookies with the residents or do arts and crafts.
Do you have any others that you can share with the rest of us
For the second year in a row, our troop is working with the other (younger) troop at their elementary school on a food drive that benefits families in need at their school.
We work with the guidance counselor and social worker at the school, who tell us how many families and the number of members in each family. The girls make signs to post around the hallways, take turns during morning announcements reminding their fellow students of the drive and finally, take an afternoon to sort and pack the donations that come in. The bags are distributed by the guidance counselor and social worker, so that the families in need remain anonymous. We don’t have a final list for this year as of yet, but last year, we provided close to 60 families several bags of groceries as well as a substantial gift card to a local grocery store for anything else they lacked over the holiday season.
The flyer that goes home via student’s backpacks lists what items we are especially looking for, like protein items as well as some special requests from some of the international families in our school community. We use a number system to identify the families, so we were able to accommodate dietary and cultural preferences, including nut allergies and vegetarians, while they remained anonymous.
Having the girls sort and pack the donations themselves gives them a hands on sense of satisfaction that is amazing to see, made more amazing by the fact that they don’t fully realize the impact they are having on some of their classmates and their families.
Becky, what a FANTASTIC project! I love that the girls help within their community, yet everyone’s privacy is respected. We should help everyone, but helping our own community really makes the biggest impact for children.