When Brooke Abbruzzese was in sixth grade, she had no idea what to expect when she wrote First Lady Michelle Obama to ask for her favorite vegetarian recipe—or if she’d even get a response. But a month later, she found in her mailbox a formal-looking envelope fastened with the official White House seal.

“I was like, ‘What the heck! Why is there something from the White House in our mailbox?’” recalled Abbruzzese, who is now 14 and a freshman at Grant Park High School in Portland.

Obama’s recipe—for White House Kitchen Garden Cucumber Soup—joins recipes from Michael Pollan, and chefs Thomas Keller and Ina Garten, and many other luminaries in Saving Pan, a new cookbook created by Abbruzzese and 13 other Portland teens. The cookbook benefits the work of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga Sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo.

“In sixth grade, I was really into the environment, and I wanted to help give back,” said Abbruzzese, who admits to an obsession with Goodall. She met a primatologist friend of her father’s who told her about Roots & Shoots, the Goodall Institute’s youth-led community action program. Abbruzzese was inspired to form a chapter in her own community, drawing mostly from her classmates at Portland’s Beverly Cleary School. After researching why chimpanzees are endangered, the girls decided to focus on raising awareness of the illegal bushmeat trade, which is one of the biggest threats to chimp populations in Africa.

Read more about this inspiring story by Hannah Wallace at Civil Eats