Local teenagers working towards the top awards in Girl Scouts and Scouting America are making a point of giving back to their communities.

Belén Babb, a senior at Vernon Hills High School, has spent much of the past year, including the summer, creating a children’s library of religious books at her parish, St. Mary of Vernon.

Gold Award projects, which must be approved by the Girl Scout council, require high school-age girls to identify an issue, research it, form a team and develop and lead the project.

Babb said she got her idea by teaching religious education in the parish, and seeing how much her students enjoyed the books she would bring in to share with them.

Since the parish already has a library ministry, with books, CDs and other resources available to parishioners, Babb consulted members of that ministry before starting fundraising.

Working with a team of about seven people, she raised money and contacted religious book publishers to purchase books and ask for donations. Over the summer, she and her team sorted books, catalogued them and scanned them into the library system.

Her goal, she said, was to get the children’s library open when religious education starts this fall with a foundation of about 250 books, including Bible stories and stories about the saints.

“Most of what I have now is little kids’ books,” she said, mostly new, although some were used books in good condition. “I just saw how much they meant to the kids.”

At the southern end of the archdiocese, Will Martin, who graduated last spring from Oak Lawn Community High School, collected donations and packed care packages for military service members in cooperation with Mrs. Jacky’s Soldiers, a volunteer effort started by Jacky Connelly in 2003.

Connelly said she started making care packages for soldiers after the parent of one of her students in a park district tot program was deployed to Iraq.

Martin’s family knows her because his sister was in one of her classes, he said.

Connelly has learned what the soldiers like to receive in care packages over more than two decades, so Martin used her lists to solicit donations online, at school, at church and wherever else he could.

“I expected to pack maybe 10 or 15 care packages,” Martin said.

Instead, he and volunteers from Troop 668 at St. Mark Lutheran Church in Worth packed 125 care packages.

Each one included two comic books, then whatever else was donated, including toiletries and personal hygiene items, small games, chewing gum and snacks.

“People wanted to support the soldiers who are overseas who currently can’t do much to support their families,” he said.

Connelly said the care packages were shipped to Kuwait and other locations in the Middle East, Germany, Poland and Romania.