Silver Award Girl Scout, Madison Boucher

Falcon's Nest Inventory System

Madison’s school has a food and clothing pantry called the Falcon’s Nest. When it was started, the purpose of the pantry was to provide disadvantaged students with snacks during the school day. Soon after the creation of the Falcon’s Nest, many students were identified as needing food at home on the weekends. Madison volunteered with the Falcon’s Nest and learned that the process of sorting, bagging, and distributing the collected food for the weekends was very time consuming and did not allow the Falcon’s Nest to serve many students.

To understand the issue more, Madison researched food insecurity and discovered that this issue affects people worldwide, not just students at her school. She found out that many schools across the country have similar food pantry programs as her school and that they have systems to track and sort the food donations in an efficient manner that allows them to help more students. Being inspired by these other programs, Madison determined that the best way to tackle food insecurity at her school was to get organized. With guidance from her project advisor, Madison created an online tracking system that allowed volunteers to catalog the food donations and sort it based on student’s dietary restrictions.

One challenge Madison faced was that her initial ideas and plans for the inventory system did not work out the way she intended. Instead of giving up, she made adjustments to the food tracking and inventory process until she came up with a system that worked for the Falcon’s Nest.

Madison says that her project helped her develop her communication skills and present information in a clear manner. Madison’s advice to others working on their Silver Award is to not give up even if things don’t go as planned.