In my freshman year of high school, I, along with my six-girl strong Girl Scout troop, embarked on a mission to help decrease the amount of people who go hungry each night in St. Louis. The idea began much smaller, and it came about while deciding what to do for our biggest service project to date, our Silver Award.

When researching problem areas in St. Louis, my home city, we came across a charity who brings birthday parties to those who can’t afford them, and so the adventure began. We collected over forty items for this charity within a month, but we felt we could do more. I began researching food banks in St. Louis, calling and emailing them with inquiries about a birthday program. I received replies from about a quarter of these charities, and most said they were either too small for that program or that their program had been discontinued due to lack of funds.

One food pantry, the Harvey Kornblum Jewish Food Pantry, sent back paragraph upon paragraph of ways we could help. It was then we decided to help them, because they were so overwhelmed with people, and didn’t have close to the amount of help as other charities seemed to have. Taking from ideas from the food pantry, we created a plan to make approximately two hundred soup bags, which required two hundred fifty pounds of beans, and four hundred small bags of spices. We bought all of this with troop funds and set aside a Saturday to make the bags of dried beans and spices.

As we passed bag after bag to the next girl in the assembly line, we discussed how we could expand our project. We ended up creating a video calling for Girl Scout troops to join with us in decreasing hunger in St. Louis and offered to come to their meeting and talk about the project and the need for food. Finally, we went to a meeting of the Girl Scout council and pitched our idea. A few short months later, we had taught over fifty scouts how they could continue this project and make soup bags on their own.

Going from meeting to meeting, girls brought in hundreds of pounds of beans and more baggies than I could count as we showed them how to create nourishing food that would supply those who needed it most. We had lesson plans to teach the girls what hunger was and used simple analogies to help them understand this epidemic.

Girl Scouts strive to be kind, to help others, and most of all, as it says in the Girl Scout law, make the world a better place. That is the spirit of Girl Scouts.