Hi! I'm Aadya, a life scout in Troop 2123. I've been a part of this troop for over 4 years (since 6th grade) and during my time, I have grown my leadership skills, learned more about the outdoors, developed scouting skills such as camping, hiking, and first aid, and met so many hardworking people I otherwise would probably not have met. Me experience in scouting has been super helpful and fun, and I hope the younger scouts in our troop will have just as enjoyable an experience as I did.
One of my favorite events as a scout was the nation-wide food drive Scouting For Food. In this two weekend event, we would start off by dividing the area assigned to our troop between all the patrols (small subsets of our troop) that showed up. Each patrol leader would receive two maps of the neighborhoods they were to cover, before driving to the street agreed upon. It would typically take about three hours, as we would go around to each house putting up paper hangers on every door. The hangers would include details such as:
the food donations we accepted
the date to leave donations outside the door
what scouting for food was
and more! The second weekend was spent collecting food donations from every door. This part was heavily dependent on adult leaders, as we would mostly drive around the streets, stopping only when we saw bags outside a door.
Sometime after my last scouting for food event, I wanted to start a clothing nonprofit. I contacted two of my friends, Trishna and Mihika, and it turned out that they already had a whole list of possible events we could run! We made a pfp, designed our website, and created our first hanger. We would go door to door one weekend putting up the hanger to donate clothes, and come back a week later to collect them. Our first drive, in Milpitas, was very successful as in total it collected 1.5K articles of clothing! All proceeds were donated to a homeless shelter called Bill Wilson Center and many people applied to join us after this first drive. An interesting experience we had was this one lady who messaged us ahead of time to tell us she had 12 bags of donations and that she would prefer that we rang her doorbell to ensure that the bags didn't get stolen. But when we got to her door, she told us a story that left us in tears.
The lady's had been living with her husband for a while, but recently, her husband had passed away. She cleaned out his entire closet and considered donating the clothes to Goodwill, but she didn't want his clothes to be sold off. When she saw our post about the drive in Milpitas, she was very eager to give her husband's clothes to a good cause and immediately sent us the text. She told us she was happy to see young people taking initiatives like these in their community and wished us the best of luck.
We plan to run more clothing drives in the near future, but I just want to thank Scouts and my troop for positively shaping me as a person and teaching me how to take the initiative!
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