Student Plans Eagle Scout Project to Benefit Foster Care Children

June 11, 2009 - PRLog -- (PASADENA, CA) -- Boy Scout Andrew Crabtree, who attends La Salle High School, recently delivered large trunks filled with camping supplies to Hillsides, a foster care children’s charity that serves Los Angeles County including Pasadena.
As part of his Eagle Scout Project, Crabtree wanted to do something new and unique that would really make a difference. He picked Hillsides as the beneficiary children’s charity since his mother had grown up in group homes and wanted to bring some happiness to kids living in foster care.
Crabtree’s favorite activity is camping.  As he began to research Hillsides charity, he discovered that foster care children are taken on a summer camp, but unlike him they don’t have all the fun gadgets, toys and equipment that make camping so fun.
“I wanted to share the great experience I had camping with the kids at Hillsides,” Crabtree said, which is why he filled and delivered camping trunks for each of the cottages to take with them on their big summer trip.
In October 2008, he began to send out solicitation letters and emails and started enlisting friends, fellow scouts, girl scouts, other scout troops and even neighbors to help with the gathering of equipment. Crabtree created a spreadsheet of wish list items he wanted to procure and followed up with as many people, stores and vendors as he could to guarantee the items.
Over the next months donations started coming in, tracking them all. Crabtree was overwhelmed by the generosity of his local community; an eighty-year-old neighbor even donated his antique spotting telescope to one of the trunks for the boys’ cottage.
Having found this process a great learning experience, Crabtree said he learned about receiving donations and encouraging bigger corporations to give, directing groups of scouts to help with assembling and packing items ready to pack in the camping boxes, and also learned the financial skills of creating an account for donations and how to use a check book. Crabtree managed to get $7,000 in in-kind donations.
The camping trunks were donated by Engineered Package Solutions and items were donated by local stores and community members such as Target, Staples, Wal-Mart, among others. Each trunk was packed with age appropriate items for each cottage, including emergency and first aid kits, insect repellant, water bottles, whistles, flashlights, sunscreen, compass, toys and games, as well as binoculars, fishing equipment, notebooks, crayons, airpumps, footballs, volleyballs, Frisbees, dream-catching kits, lanyard kits and even smores ingredients.
Comprehensive in his planning, Crabtree also made a general trunk containing extra supplies for the cottages and more emergency tools.
While delivering the nine large trunks to Hillsides, Crabtree said “I had fun, and although it was a lot of work, it really paid off to see the final results.”
To learn more about the Pasadena foster care children’s charity, visit www.Hillsides.org and www.HillsidesEducationCenter.org.

# # #

Pasadena charity founded in 1913, Hillsides creates safe places for children in foster care living in its residential and community treatment centers preventing the cycle of abuse for children at risk and their families. Visit www.hillsides.org