Council on Aging Assistant Directors Abigail Butt and Joan Ingersoll with items collected by Girl Scouts for gift bags for seniors.
For the second year in a row, Lincoln’s Girl Scouts is reaching across the generations with three projects to help seniors in town.
After handing out lists of needed items to fellow students and shoppers, Scouts put collection boxes in Donelan’s and the Lincoln School. The donated items — necessities such as toiletries, paper towels and toilet paper, kitchen sponges, toothbrushes and toothpaste, laundry soap, socks, coffee and tea, postage stamps and more — arrived in three overflowing vans at Bemis Hall, where Council on Aging (COA) staff made up over 30 holiday gift bags that were hand-delivered to seniors. The bags also included holiday craft items made by Scouts from the first-, fourth-, and sixth-grade troops.
The sixth-grade troop also consulted with the Fire Department and Parks and Recreation Department to get a list of items that seniors need during winter storms. They then held a successful drive to collect things including flashlights, manual can openers, gloves, and folding shovels that were gathered into kits by Parks and Rec, placed in bags donated by the Lincoln Police Department, and distributed by the COA to seniors who would not have been able to afford them otherwise.
In an ongoing project, the sixth-grade troop is delivering buckets of sand and salt to make walkways and driveways safer to walk on after snow and ice storms to any Lincoln senior who requests it to. This important project will help prevent falls among seniors, help home health services get safely into homes to provide care, and ensure that seniors can get Meals on Wheels. Seniors may call the Council on Aging at 781-259-8811 to sign up to receive a bucket.
The Council on Aging has received many expressions of gratitude such as “I can’t believe the town does this for us!” and “this is such a nice gesture!” from seniors who’ve received these donations. After the success of this year’s efforts and those in 2018, the Girl Scouts and many others in town look forward to continuing this helpful new holiday collaboration in 2020.