Bristol Girl Scout Troop 9417 create bronze award project to benefit The Sharing Center

Bristol Girl Scout Troop 9417 has spent recent months working on a project aimed at helping the community through these tough times.

Here’s a description of how it all came together from a Troop representative:

Bristol Troop 9417has been together since Kindergarten, all entering 6^th grade at Bristol School. The bronze award in Girl Scouts is the highest honor a Junior level troop can achieve and is meant to be a girl-led project, serving the community to help address an issue that the troop cares about. Back in the winter the troop had spent a significant amount of time planning their bronze award – involving hosting an event with other troops in the area and a “fill the bus” type event at a local store – however, they realized in April that with all the social distancing restrictions we would have to come up with something totally different. To their credit they still wanted to proceed and do something to help their community and figure out how they could do it within the “new norms.” So they decided on a food drive to benefit the Sharing Center because they had heard about so many families impacted by job losses due to Covid and this was something they could do without a lot of direct interaction with other people, they could wear masks when needed, etc. They also knew The Sharing Center mainly helped people in their direct community which they liked. Over the course of five meetings in May and June they did research to figure out what items were the most needed, came up with the flyers to distribute, requested support from some local businesses for donations, passed out more than 400 flyers and then spent a Saturday morning picking up all the donations, sorting it, counting/tallying/weighing everything and then dropping it off at The Sharing Center. After meeting with The Sharing Center they decided to focus on items that aren’t typically donated but really needed – cereal, condiments, spices, canned meat/tuna, salad dressing, toothpaste, shampoo. Some fun statistics: The Troop collected 1,980 pounds of food, 70 boxes of cereal, 45 bottles of ketchup, 37 tubes of toothpaste, 105 boxes of macaroni and cheese and 65 cans of tuna.