West Bridgewater 12-year-old to hold 2nd yearly bake sale to benefit local food pantry

WEST BRIDGEWATER – Last year, 12-year-old Moriah Winchell held a bake sale for the West Bridgewater Food Pantry that raised nearly $3,000. 

This year, the West Bridgewater student is working with her Girl Scouts troop to raise even more money. 

It all started last year around the holidays, said Moriah's mother, Melissa Winchell. Moriah is immunocompromised, so when the COVID-19 pandemic began, her doctors told her family she needed a strict quarantine, Winchell said.

Moriah also has down syndrome, autism and selective mutism, so remote schooling wasn't accessible for her. Winchell took up homeschooling Moriah, but it also caused Moriah to be even more isolated from her community. 

"To be fully excluded from the community and from school was really hard for all of us," Winchell said. 

But one of the things Moriah was still able to do with her teachers was bake – one of her favorite activities. Winchell said they would have Zoom baking sessions together that were a lot of fun. 

"She can be fairly independent with it. She's been baking with me since she was 3 years old," Winchell said. 

Winchell said that over the years, Moriah has become a more and more independent baker. She said Moriah is a great reader, so she's able to read the recipe, find the right tools and is getting better and better at measuring out the ingredients. 

"I think she just loves that feeling of being able to do it on her own. And let's be real, she really loves licking the spoon," Winchell said.

Last November, Winchell got the idea that Moriah could do a little bake sale for friends and raise some money for the West Bridgewater Food Bank, to which Moriah had given some of her allowance before. 

"It's a very concrete thing to understand that some people don't have food and we need to help people to have food," Winchell said.  

Moriah decided she wanted to do more, so for four weekends at the end of November and beginning of December, Moriah baked up a storm, putting a table on her porch every weekend with cookies and a donation jar. 

While the cookies were free, people were encouraged to donate a little to the food pantry. Winchell said it worked, with lots of people giving as much as $100. 

Though the fundraiser was a success, the bake sale had many other benefits for Moriah. 

"Moriah would watch from the window or sometimes open the door and say hi to people. She's very shy," Winchell said. "So this actually turned out to be a great way for her to do it because she loved watching the cars pull up."

Winchell said people began to leave cards and notes for Moriah. 

"That's the part that makes me the most emotional because they started to understand like, 'Oh, she's not going anywhere. She's not doing anything,'" she said. "So some kids and some other folks would just leave her notes and cards to say thank you." 

The bake sale also aided in Moriah's homeschooling, Winchell said. They made a fundraising chart to help visualize the impact and would also count money together. 

After the bake sale ended, Moriah was presented a trophy by the food pantry for her help. She also kept on baking for local group homes for months until she was entirely baked out. 

Now, Moriah is vaccinated, back to school and participating in her Girl Scout troop. Together, she and her Girl Scout troop are planning one big bake sale in the West Bridgewater Town Hall parking lot on Sunday, Dec. 12 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. 

Winchell said Moriah plans to bake a variety of goods for the sale, from banana muffins to M&M cookies to iced sugar cookies. 

Winchell said she's expecting hundreds of people to show up, based on the reception they got last year, but even if it's a poor turnout, there's still so much else that's rewarding for her and Moriah. 

"I think it does as much for us as it does for the food pantry and everybody else," she said. 

Enterprise staff writer Susannah Sudborough can be reached by email at ssudborough@enterprisenews.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @k_sudborough. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Enterprise today.