Girl Scouts collect food for pantry

Just four Girl Scouts gathered 5,120 pounds of food for local food shelves, with the help of Jamestown students.

“How can you not donate when you know how many people need it?” said Maxine Mjoen, 13, one of the cadets in Girl Scout Troop No. 30918.

Mjoen and Nichole Domke, 14, are helping with the project, which is serving as a Silver Award effort for their fellow scouts, Jennie Bump, 14, and Paulina Kuske, 14. All the girls live in Jamestown.

“Silver needs to be a project done with the community,” said Sally Domke, who co-leads the troop along with Brandy Mjoen. The Silver Award is the highest possible honor at the cadet level of Girl Scouting.

When school started, they started discussing possible Silver Award projects. Kuske came up with the idea to gather food for the Jamestown Community Action Food Pantry, and the group decided to try a school-wide food donation contest among all the schools in Jamestown.

As it happened, Jamestown High School was already doing its own food drive, but all the other schools participated, including the Jamestown Middle School and St. John’s Academy.

Flyers donated by the UPS Store in Jamestown went out to each student explaining the Scouts’ project, and a box for donations was put into every room with another flyer attached.

In each building, the classes competed against each other to gather the most food. Winning classes will receive a pizza party, courtesy of Domino’s in Jamestown.

Winning classes at JMS were: Mariah McKenney’s sixth-graders, Ruth Brubakken’s seventh-graders and Michelle Prasek’s eighth-graders.

At St. John’s Academy, the sixth grade took top honors.

A winning class was named in each elementary school. They were Michael Rudy’s fifth-graders at Gussner Elementary School, Judy White’s fourth-graders at Roosevelt Elementary School, Brenda Jensen’s first-graders at Washington Elementary School, Scott Fritz’s fourth-graders at Lincoln Elementary School and Elaine Hegland’s first-graders at Louis L’Amour Elementary School.

The classes that collected the most total items were Rudy’s class, with 2,233 donations, and Fritz’s class, with 2,008 items.

“We had to count it and collect it all,” Nichole said.

They spent three days doing that, and together they saw all the things that had been donated — food of all kinds, plus paper, books, toilet paper and personal hygiene products such as shampoo.

“Canned goods are really heavy,” Bump said, adding there were a lot of ramen noodles.

In their efforts to pack vans and trailers with food, they had the help of Boy Scout Dawson Domke, 12.

They loaded a trailer and filled up most of the space Community Action had. The project isn’t quite finished, yet, either — the Scouts will head back there to help sort out the food items.

“It’s fun anyway,” Kuske said.

All of them said they enjoyed the project, and all of them said they would be more likely to donate to food shelves in the future.

“They worked very hard,” Brandy added.

The donated 5,120 pounds of food and hygiene items will likely last until about May, serving about 200 families in town each month.

Sun reporter Kari Lucin can be reached at 701-952-8453

or by email at klucin@jamestownsun.com

Tags: local news, news, food, pantry