As COVID-19 cases spread quickly in April, Denise Cherry was afraid to leave her home. She had 1 three family members to the virus, and with medical problems of her own, she wasn't taking any 2 . Hopeless, the 65-year-old woman responded to a nextdoor.com post from a stranger offering 3 . That stranger was Christy Cheung, who lived a few neighborhoods away in Gaithersburg, a 4 city of 70,000. She came the next day with her four-year-old son, Ethan. They 5 Cherry's rubbish and brought in her mail, and they kept coming 6 she was well enough to do for herself.
"On our street, we have a few 7 , so we're the eyes and ears for them. Fix doors and computers and mow their lawns," says Cheung, 32. "We said, 'There's a grandma that needs help.' And Ethan was 8 : ‘I'm going to help. I'm going to be a helper!' "
Gaithersburg is a young and diverse community, so it's no 9 that the city's youth are leading the way. In April, seven-year-old Cavanaugh Bell spent his life's savings of $600 10 care packages for his grandmother's friends. He calls himself the city's chief 11 creator. Area teens are helping their elders, too, 12 for Teens Helping Seniors, a grocery delivery service created by high school pals.
For Cherry, whose family is broken by the virus, young people bring 13 . "We were taught that 14 you can't change something, accept it," she says. "But these young people, their 15 is, 'I'm going to change what I can't accept.'''
