Boo! Girl Scouts Lead a Halloween Costume Drive for Homeless Kids

by Josie Raymond · 2010-10-21 08:00:00 UTC
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Christmas is probably the donation-spurring holiday — and for good reason — but many homeless children need a little help participating in other important events, like trick-or-treating. Growing up, was there anything more exciting than dressing up as a witch, a pumpkin or a rock star and going door-to-door collecting candy? Imagine how much more importance the occasion would have if costumes, much less new clothes and candy, even your own front door, were hard to come by.

Daisy Girl Scout Troop 1459 in northern Ohio has been collecting gently used Halloween costumes for homeless children. There's a decorated collection box in school that's also available for mass visitors. One trooper and her mom got the idea from reading about a similar project. Maybe someone reading this will initiate another one, keeping the domino effect going.

The six and seven-year-olds will earn "Daisy Learning Petals" and participation patches for their kindness and initiative. More importantly, they'll get a very early lesson in empathy when they deliver the costumes and take a tour of the Project Hope for the Homeless shelter. They won't soon forget it, and they'll be light years ahead of their peers without the same chance to learn about homelessness.

Housed children can have a hard time understanding why other children are homeless, so this provides a great opportunity to start the discussion. On a day when so many choose to pretend to be homeless to get laughs from their friends, here's a chance to explain that the homeless would rather be anything but. And on Halloween they can be, whether that's a princess, a frog or just a regular kid complaining about the old lady who gives fruit to trick-or-treaters.

Photo credit: epSos .de

Josie Raymond is a Change.org editor who has reported from the streets of the South Bronx, written for several magazines that folded (not her fault) and fixed thousands of typos.
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