A few homeless teens around the Columbus area will be receiving secondhand jeans thanks to work done by some gracious MSMS students. The MSMS Presidential Cabinet paired up with Do Something Club to gather jeans for homeless teens in Columbus through the Jeans for Teens project.

MSMS’s involvement with Jeans for Teens is the second of many community service projects that MSMS will be involved with this year. “The Presidential Cabinet is organizing one big project every month with several small projects throughout the month. It’s just our way of giving back to the community, and we really wanted to capitalize on the commitment to service this year,” said Jenny Nguyen, SGA president.

“Teens for Jeans is a service project that the national Do Something Club does every year, and we thought it would be a great opportunity for us to participate and help out a great cause” said Nguyen. The Do Something Club looks at the homelessness throughout the nation and sees that it is a rampant problem piercing the nation. To succeed in the club’s motto of “making the world suck less,” they began programs like Teens for Jeans.

According to 2014 Point-in-Time Report, 34% of the total homeless population is under 24, and The Department of Justice estimates that every year, more than 1.7 million teens experience homelessness in the U.S. Though these numbers seem bleak, with organizations like Do Something Club, homeless teens have someone looking out for them.

Dipal Patel, one of SGA’s community service coordinators, urges students to donate jeans while the drive is still active “We like to choose volunteer opportunities that would help our immediate community. It’s great to think on a large scale, but it’s more effective to act on a small scale. On top of that, we like do service that would allow a large amount of students to participate in together.”

Students who have lightly worn jeans to donate can find the donation bin in the first floor lobby of Goen. If someone does not have any jeans to donate, there remains many other opportunities to help the local community in the upcoming months.