They ran with and jostled the bags, all 250 of them, through the pouring rain and into the Denver Social Services building Wednesday afternoon, carefully placing them on the floor and racing to get some more.
When they were done, the nine girls of Junior Girl Scouts Troop 2035 from Littleton giggled loudly. They each smiled brightly. They knew they had done a good thing.
Inside each bag was a stuffed animal, coloring books and crayons, a hairbrush and comb, body wash, a washcloth, hand sanitizer, a toothbrush and toothpaste.
There are, on any given day, about 700 to 800 children in foster care in the city and county of Denver alone. Kids enter the system every day, and the way it plays out often is not very pretty.
As one of the Girl Scouts, Arianna Hernandez, 11, explained it to me: “When the police arrive, they have to go in such hurry that they can’t take stuff they love, a stuffed animal or even a toothbrush. We wanted to give them things they weren’t able get on the way out of the door.”
So, early in September, Troop 2035 came up with the idea for the bags. They are 10- and 11-year-olds, and all but one a student at Powderhorn Elementary School.
They needed a project to earn their Bronze Award, the highest available to fifth-grade Scouts. They thought of police officers, firefighters and the like. They settled on foster kids.
To fill the bags, they needed donations. They sold scores of Girl Scout cookies, donating the 60 cents they receive for each box to the project.
And they set up a table outside a Dollar Tree store near their school, asking each customer to buy one thing they could put in the bags. They were inundated with items.
In the end, the girls had raised nearly $2,000.
“What a great thing it is for those young girls to give back and give to kids in need of comfort at what can be such a traumatic time,” said Margaret Booker, who heads foster care in the Denver Department of Human Services. “For us, it is huge.”
We chatted a little about foster care. Little did I know that this, being May, is National Foster Parent Appreciation Month.
Booker speaks of her foster parents in almost reverential tones.
“The vast majority want to make a real difference in the lives of children,” she said. “They have almost a calling to share their lives with kids who need them the most.”
There are between 300 and 350 foster homes in Denver right now. As always, more foster parents are needed.
She keeps foster parents, on average, one or two years. Some have done it more than 25 years, but they are the exceptions, she said.
The average foster parent, Margaret Booker said, has two to three foster kids. Mostly she needs adults willing to take in siblings, the hardest group to place, she said.
Her goal always, she said, is keeping brothers and sisters together. Without more people willing to take them in, that is not always possible, she said.
I told her I would give out the number of her foster-parent-recruiting hotline: 720-944-4000.
The nine Junior Girl Scouts watched closely as social services workers gathered up the bags, and smiled and laughed each time the workers gave them a thumbs-up.
When the last of the bags had been loaded onto a cart and disappeared into an elevator, the girls giggled again and ran back into the rain.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
