Ginny Goes For the Gold

Hi, I'm Ginny.  This is a story about a room that needed building, hungry children, and going for my Gold Award...

I have a friend named Lori Cripple.  One night she was watching TV with her family, when she saw a news show about children who do not have enough to eat at home.  The children come to school unable to learn.  It's hard to concentrate when you are hungry.  Some people from a local church decided to help.  The started a Backpack Buddy program.  The teachers explained that the students without enough to eat on the weekend come to school not ready to learn on Mondays.  This starts the week off on a back note.  The Backpack Buddy program works with the local school district sends home much needed and nutritious food.  Lori was so inspired that she decided to see what the situation was in our community. She found out that it was a bigger problem than she realized.  She went to a local church and they were willing to help her get started and provide some space.  How inspiring! Way to go Lori for taking action.

The first year of the program, I started volunteering, because what can I say, Ms. Lori inspired me and I wanted to help.  That year, we served about 65 children in need on a weekly basis.  The next year the number grew to about 82.  That's when we realized we had a problem.  The space we were using for food storage and preparation of bag packing was not appropriate to store enough food for the added children.  Lori became afraid that our program might not be able to meet the needs of the four schools in our community.  Also, the room was upstairs, making it hard for the volunteers to carry the food upstairs, store it, pack it in bags, and then bring it back down stairs to be delivered to the schools each week.  There was a corner in the old fellowship hall of the church that I thought might be a good solution to the problem.  I asked the board at the church, and my take action project for my Gold Award was born, "Big B: Building Better Buddies."  I was going to coordinate and build a room for Backpack Buddies.  The church even decided to fund the project, but required I stay under budget.

Here is the space where the room would be built.

You can see that there was a lot of work to do.
Before I could even begin, I had to make a plan and clean the space out.

I knew it was important to the church, that the room match the rest of the building decor and trim.  I also needed a project advisor.  So, I asked one of the pastors that also had some construction know how.  Rev. Ben agreed.








 Thanks Rev. Ben for being my Project Coordinator, and for making it FUN!

Here we are getting the "BIG B" started.
Volunteers came and helped from the church, Girl Scout Troop 6003, and Long Beach High School Student Council. We Had a fun day as we raised the walls.  We had over 40 volunteers and friends to help us.

Erin and her drill.  You Go Girl.

Erin and I had fun hanging sheetrock.  

Celebrating the walls being up!

This is a picture of Ms. Lori when she saw what we had done.

She was really excited to see the new room for Backpack Buddies.  That day we raised the walls, but there was still a lot to get done.  The doors needed to go up next, then primer, paint, more paint, trim, more paint.  All in all it took 3 months to get all the details finished.  But finally, we were ready for the door knob.  Here is a picture of me on my last trip to Lowes  to get the door knob.  It sure felt good to make that last trip. (Just a side note, all together, my mom and I spend over 12 hours in Lowes. We are so thankful that they were so nice and willing to help!)

We did run into a few problems, like do these doors look right?  

We had to make a few adjustments, and we did a couple of do overs.  But I was really proud to bring the project in under budget, and Ms. Lori got a few extras like custom rolling charts to move large quantities of food.