Hannah Buckler says her favorite part of being a Girl Scout is getting to help out around the community, and for her Silver Award Project the New City seventh-grader is looking to help out a lot of people.
For her project, which centers around hunger, Buckler, 12, wants to help New York State raise its minimum wage.
“My mom and I talked about the root causes of hunger, and we came up with minimum wage,” she said. “We kind of expanded on that a lot and how it connected to hunger in our community.”
In her research, Buckler found that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver just this year proposed a bill that would increase the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 an hour, and so she is starting a petition to support the raise in minimum wage.
But that’s not all Buckler has planned for the roughly year-long project. She’s also volunteered at Soup Angels, a soup kitchen in Nyack, three times and hopes to do it more going forward.
“I just love it there, it’s amazing,” she said. “We take food for granted and I see all these people at Soup Angels and it just touches me so much that I can help.”
On Saturday, June 23rd, she is holding a food drive at Stop & Shop in New City in the morning to collect food to donate to Soup Angels. The drive will be in the morning, most likely at 8 a.m. and going until 9:30 a.m.
Buckler said she reached out to State Sen. David Carlucci about helping with the food drive and her project, and she heard back that he would be happy to support it. She also reached out to Silver and is waiting to hear back from him.
At the food drive, she will also have her petition to get signed and will hand out orange ribbons as orange is the color of hunger awareness.
Buckler said she’s currently planning the flyers to make for the food drive, and has plans to make a video to put on Youtube about hunger awareness.
Outside of the project, Buckler helps out with younger Girl Scout troops and said she enjoys attending Hebrew school at Beth Am Temple in Pearl River.
She hopes that at some point she will attend a town board meeting and talk about her work with minimum wage and hunger awareness.
“I just want to raise the community’s awareness that this is going on all over the world and how we can help,” she said.
