Girl Scouts And YEH Team Up to Relieve Hunger
Volunteers packing the meals for Stop Hunger Now in the high school’s lower cafeteria.
Shaker students’ packing skills will help feed 258 hungry children.
The 80 volunteers at the Stop Hunger Now food-packing event successfully packaged 12,744 meals in the high school cafeteria Sept. 19, exceeding their goal of 12,000.
Girl Scout troop 70101 asked the Youth Ending Hunger club to join them as they partnered with the Stop Hunger Now program for the project. “Ms. Pelfrey and [her daughter] Celia asked if YEH could help be a part of this event,” one of YEH’s advisers, William Scanlon, wrote. “We worked together to get the space in the high school and to advertise.”
“We had to raise $3,500 to do this.” Girl Scout troop 70101’s leader Clara Pelfrey said. The troop did fundraising activities such as car washes, cookie sales and two bake sales to raise the money. The earnings, including $1,575 in donations, helped buy the food, which cost 29 cents per meal.
The Girl Scouts had been planning this event for more than a year in hopes of earning their silver award, a badge they can receive once the scouts complete a community service project.
Stop Hunger Now is “an international hunger relief organization,” according to the program’s assistant manager, Shaun Starkey. “We host food packing events to distribute [meals] worldwide.” The meals are mainly distributed through schools and clinics in the recipient countries.
“I feel very accomplished,” Girl Scout Celia Pelfrey, a freshman, said. The volunteers, including nine Chilean exchange students, packed 744 more than their original goal of 12,000 meals.
At the various stations, the volunteers first scooped rice and dried vegetables into bags along with a vitamin packet. After this process, the bags were taken to another station, where they were weighed, closed and piled on a platform to soon be put on a truck.
Although they still don’t know where the meals are being shipped, “the goal is that they reach where they will have the greatest impact,” Starkey said. The meals packaged will be “enough to feed 258 children for a year,” Clara Pelfrey wrote.
The Stop Hunger Now program helps students enjoy making an impact for thousands worldwide. “It was a very good experience,” Girl Scout Tykerra Williams said. Two other girls in the troop, Clio Thorman, a freshman at Laurel, and Celia Pelfrey both agreed that “it was fun.”
Troop 70101 raised awareness for hunger relief at the middle school and continues to do so at the high school. According to Clara Pelfrey they “started a YEH [group] in the middle school” while the Girl Scouts were still attending. “Every day 21,000 people die of hunger,” Starkey said, “not because of scarcity of food but because of immobility. It’s our part as citizens to help people in need.”
