Gunn High School sophomore Arjun Parikh just got his start-up funded -- an initiative that combines his love of soccer with an impulse to give.

Parikh is one of eight student grant recipients of Gunn@Your Service, a kind of parent booster club for community service that awards grants to "social entrepreneurs."

He plans to use the $200 to help launch a youth soccer camp at Cubberley Community Center this summer -- and donate proceeds to Right to Play, an international charity that provides coaches for 700,000 low-income children in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America.

"This is my first endeavor into entrepreneurship and philanthropy. We'll see how it goes," Parikh said of the project he started with six friends, Laces Soccer Camps.

The other seven student recipients of Gunn @ Your Service grants, this year, are:

• Freshman Leland Wei, who will buy a rototiller and vibration plate for his Eagle Scout project to renovate a beat-up path near the Palo Alto Duck Pond, which he hopes to complete over spring break in April

• Sophomore Divya Saini, who plans to mount an earthquake-education campaign in Palo Alto

• Junior Tatiana Grossman, who will use the funds to help Gunn's African Literacy Club ship children's books for primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa

• Junior Sungkook Peter Kim, who will provide sheet music and music stands for Gunn musicians performing for patients at the Palo Alto Veterans' Health Care Center

• Junior Praniti Sinha, who will help Gunn's Asha Club run a fundraiser for Asha for Education, an organization that provides computers, food and education to orphans in Bangalore, India

• Junior Lily Tsai, who will buy flutes to loan to music students in an afterschool music program at Costano School in East Palo Alto. In the program, Gunn Music@Costano, eight Gunn students go to Costano once a week to teach music, including flute, piano and trumpet, to more than 20 participating Costano students.

• Senior Natasha Allen, who will ship academic books to South Sudan in cooperation with Sudan-American Foundation for Education and STAND, the student arm of the Genocide Intervention Network.

Tsai said she and her sister Stephanie began teaching piano and violin at Costano three years ago, after Stephanie Tsai visited the school with the Gunn orchestra.

"Last year, we decided that since so many students in the afterschool program wanted to participate and we, as only two people, didn't have enough time to teach them all, we would try to bring in more Gunn music students to teach.

"Thus was the start of Gunn Music@Costano," Tsai said. "This year we have eight students participating."

Tsai said she'll try to buy four flutes, which would enable half the Costano flute students at a time to take the instrument home. The Palo Alto Unified School District has lent the program violins and cellos, she said.

Allen said she got interested in Sudan after taking a class at Gunn called "Facing History and Ourselves: the sociology of genocide," with teacher Ronen Habib.

"We not only learned about the causes and terrible effects of genocide but also about genocidal acts that are being committed even now," Allen said.

She started a STAND Club at Gunn, aimed at spreading the word against genocide through efforts like letterwriting to politicians. The club plans to collect books around town to send to schools in South Sudan.

"Due to the high cost of shipping, we can only send high-level books, such as college and AP textbooks," she said.

Grossman will use her grant to augment her long-standing project of helping establish libraries in primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa. That effort which she launched at the age of 12 has grown into the award-winning nonprofit Spread the Words. The organization has established libraries serving 99 African villages and primary schools where before there were none.

Grossman's mother, Lauren Janov, organized Gunn@Your Service two years ago, and this is the group's second round of grant-making. Funds are raised through an appeal letter that goes out to parents early in the year and through a Yahoo group email list.

"Our mission is about making it easy for kids and families to do community service, promoting it and building community," Janov said.

"Different kids want to do service in different ways."

Two years ago, the South Palo Alto Food Closet faced imminent closure, after steadily providing groceries for thousands of hungry local families for 33 years. As with so many programs that were founded in the middle of the last century, the steadfast volunteers who ran it were aging, and new leaders had yet to step forward.

But due to the devotion of parishioners at Covenant Presbyterian Church and others in the faith community, the East Meadow Drive pantry has been revived.

The food closet provides badly needed groceries to 85 to 100 needy Palo Alto families, according to Jan Hoover, treasurer of the board that runs the program.

"It's surprising sometimes what people are going through," Hoover said, recalling how fortunes can quickly change. Some people just need a boost to tide them over for a short time.

One family with three children had a daughter with recurring cancer. Medical expenses ate up their wages, and even with two working parents, they could not make ends meet, she said.

One summer a teacher at a local community college arrived to receive food for her three small children. The teacher couldn't find work when the college didn't hold a summer session, Hoover said.

"I had no idea the need in the community was so great," she said.

With housing expenses consuming a large portion of people's income, the food closet helps close the gap by putting good-quality food on the table, she said.

Families with children or with a disabled adult can come once weekly to pick up milk, meat, eggs and canned goods; families of two without children can come every other week, she said. The clients, whose income mustn't exceed 150 percent of the poverty level, are referred to the pantry by churches, St. Vincent de Paul Society, schools or social workers at the Opportunity Center.

Second Harvest Food Bank of San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties provides some of the food that is distributed, but the pantry also receives contributions from individuals, school groups and Scout troops, among others.

Volunteers pick up day-old bread and donations from Safeway, Piazza's, Trader Joe's and Draeger's, she said.

Then, there are the "urban gleaners," who collect from stores the cartons of partially smashed eggs, dented but sealed milk cartons, or other slightly bruised but edible foods that won't be sold. Volunteers pick out broken eggshells and clean up cartons, repackaging them into a full dozen that clients can take home, she said. For Thanksgiving the families received gift cards to Safeway that could go for a turkey or other holiday-meal fixings.

Eight churches and the Jewish Community Center Senior Group also routinely take part in the collection and distribution, purchasing chickens and other meats with cash donated by parishioners.

The first Sunday of each month parishioners bring canned food. Some make memorial cash donations in someone's name, according to Mary Lee Templeton, a board member and former church elder.

On Dec. 2, from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Dec. 3, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Dec. 4, noon to 2 p.m. the Covenant church will host an alternative-giving fair, which offers gifts for sale to support artisans in other countries and which will also feature an opportunity to help the food closet, she said.

The food closet was founded in 1978, Hoover said. The lifeline almost ended in 2009.

But one Covenant church member refused to let the pantry shut down. The late Jean Scott, who was also instrumental in creating Greer Park, was "a tireless warrior" when it came to a cause she believed in, Templeton said.

"She was one of the smallest and quietest people at the church," she recalled. But Scott did a sales pitch to church members and local churches to revive the food closet.

Hoover said monetary donations for the holiday season, which go to purchasing fresh meat, are needed. The program has enough canned goods for now. The food bank is a tax-deductible nonprofit organization and is located at Covenant Presbyterian Church, 670 East Meadow Drive, Palo Alto.