I precisely placed cookie after cookie on each plastic tray, staring at the line of hungry people that trickled outside the kitchen door and onto the street outside. At five years old, there were not many tasks I could complete, so this was how my experience at Must Ministries began.
It is easy to call Must a soup kitchen, but it is more than that. It is a roof, a warm meal, career training, an interview closet. It is a hand up, to bigger and better things, not just a hand out. My mom has been volunteering there since before I was born, and so I am lucky enough to have the experience of helping others from a very young age.
At first, it was just cookies on trays and lettuce on sandwiches. Eventually, I was helping to prepare and serve full meals for an average of sixty to seventy hungry residents: usually adults, but sometimes children; always heartbreaking. So, when I needed to pick a cause for my Gold Award project, I immediately knew what I was going to focus on: Hunger.
Originally, my plan was to create an organizational calendar and a library of tested recipes for MUST, but I quickly realized that this plan was going to be ineffective. I also ran a food drive in February that collected over 600 items for the pantries at MUST Ministries. I created an informational brochure about hunger to spread awareness about the issue, and I spoke about my cause at the 2013 GS Friendship Fair.
In the fall, I decided my next goal was to spread awareness among youth. I contacted several local elementary schools and presented a skit about hunger, which can be found here on this website. At the elementary schools, I also ran a "Scare Away Hunger" cereal drive that collected over 300 items.
A few weeks after the skit, I returned to the elementary schools with a survey about what they had learned, and I was so proud of my results:
Now, my work on my Gold Award project is finished, but the impact is supposed to carry on. I taught hundreds of elementary school students about food insecurity, and hopefully, I've taught you something too.
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