Socks Of Love- By Jennifer

One thing you may or may not know about me is that I am a Girl Scout Leader, I am also the Queen of Pinterest FAILS, very unlike my cousin, Melanie that runs this blog! Today, we spent the entire day outside of a Dollar Tree, our local $1 store with permission from the Manager. We were asking for Donations for Homeless People. We call this Socks of Love, this is one Pinterest Idea that I did not FAIL on today! We had a checklist with the items that we were requesting like socks, and various toiletries. As people entered the store, the girls asked that each person purchase just one extra item to help us donate to the homeless. People were coming out with bags upon bags of donations! We will be putting ribbons around the tops and tags to let the local shelter know what they are. I had collaborated with another Troop that was a year older than us, but the same level to make the project bigger than just my 12 girl scouts.

I asked that each parent and child sign up for one hour at least to seek out donations and we had enough girls to ask for donations, take the donation and then construct the completed socks. I was simply and utterly overwhelmed by the amazing community that I live in that people were so generous to donate so much! One of the things that I do hear from the community is that they see us selling cookies and asking for money, but they never see us doing anything else. We do plenty of this stuff behind the scenes, but I thought if people see us in the community making these socks and helping others that they are more apt to buy our cookies come February, you too can purchase cookies online and have them delivered to your house with a small shipping fee.   We receive .75 cents a box this year for my daughter and we will be using this money towards our Bronze Project. We have so many opportunities for a project, but I have not gotten the girls to agree on one thing. One thing we did hear about is a GO BUCKET in the classroom for lockdown drills. During a lockdown, the children and teacher have to seek shelter in place, this means they are locked in the classroom for an indefinite amount of time. What if you have to go to the bathroom? Thirsty? Hungry? Diabetic? These GO BUCKETS are 5 gallon buckets that you fill with a large bottle of water to share, granola bars, sugar packets for diabetics, and tampons (not just for the normal reason, these are the best to use if you have a gunshot wound and need to clot a wound) If someone has to go to the bathroom, you empty out all items, pull up some tablecloths or shower curtains for privacy and do your business in the bucket. The point of the Bronze project is to do something that benefits the community. We are still in search of things to do that we can all agree on and/or additional service projects similar to this one. If you have any ideas, please let me know. I am so proud of my daughter who stood out in the Northeastern weather today, which was cold, rainy and very windy! I love that the girls in my troop are eager to help! I am so fortunate to have an amazing group of girls and would love for any of my readers to share their stories of helping in the community and how certain things were wonderful and how others didn’t work out so well. We will be making quilts to benefit another local charity and I will be sure to share some photos with you soon. I am so excited about that event!