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When Sagen Woolery first heard a divine call to help others, she was only in the second grade. It took two years to get things rolling in her town of Warner Robins, Georgia, but after two summers she and 130 child volunteers had served 3,600 meals. "I had been wondering what happens to the children during the summer when the free-lunch program ends at the close of the school year—what did they eat?" says Sagen, now 12. "If they couldn't afford lunch for nine months of the year, what did they do for the other three months?"

These were heavy questions for an 8-year-old to ask, her parents thought. But Sagen wasn't just asking questions; she wanted solutions. When Sagen decided the community needed a summer feeding program for children, her parents said, "Great; now you need to find a way to do it," recalls her mother, Pam Woolery.

"We gave her some guidance and pointed her in the direction of where to look for support in Warner Robins, but we stressed that it was her responsibility to make it work."

Sagen's parents suggested she go to Sam Guimond, a member of the family's church, Sacred Heart Catholic. The elderly Guimond, who oversaw a soup kitchen for many years, was polite but didn't take the child seriously.

"I kept asking him so many questions that he eventually started ignoring me at church, but I just kept after him for a year," Sagen says with a shy smile.

Eventually Guimond saw her level of commitment and began to mentor her, teaching her how to organize a feeding kitchen and planting ideas about how to bring her vision to reality.

What her parents thought would be a short-term preoccupation soon became a burning passion. Before long, third-grader Sagen was on the Warner Robins speaking circuit, making visits to a variety of civic groups and churches to share her passion for hungry children.

Some adults politely shrugged her off. Whenever she faced indifference or opposition, Guimond would prompt her with one question: What would Jesus do? "There were a lot of people who didn't take me seriously," she says, "but God took me seriously, and that's all that mattered."

By the summer of 1998, Sagen had obtained the support of 10 churches for the community's first "Kids' Kitchen" at First United Methodist Church. With Guimond in the background, Sagen, then a fourth-grader, supervised the ministry like a gentle Army mess sergeant—polite but always in charge. Only child volunteers would do the work, she decided. Adults could keep their eyes on the clocks to ensure the work progressed on time, but they were not allowed to lift a fork or wash a plate.

Concerned with safety, Sagen prohibited using sharp objects such as knives in food preparation, and she avoided using stoves or micro wave ovens. She set up an assembly line of peers to assemble sack lunches with food donated or purchased through cash gifts. Others placed bags of chips, a few cookies, fruits, and soft drinks in the paper sacks.

Sagen refined the process as the first summer continued, setting up a database of 35 children, ages 8 through 12, who would volunteer for specific days. The Wednes day feeding might happen only four times a month, but choreographing the schedule took hours. At times she was overrun with volunteers, with as many as 18 peers showing up when she needed only 10.

The team served 600 lunches on a typical Wednesday, and recipients could take leftovers home to share with their families at dinner.

Taking her faith seriously is nothing new to the soft-spoken seventh-grader at Bonaire Middle School. It's something she does, she says, because the Bible says to do it.

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14