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As you know if you are a regular reader, I promote this blog on a variety of Facebook pages for Girl Scout Leaders, and I use those same pages to solicit input for this blog. I asked to interview people who felt they/their daughter had an extraordinarily good or bad experience with the higher awards (and if you are such a person I'd love to talk to you, please leave a comment below or email me at ruthjoec at aol.com). Chris Lynn and I spoke not long ago about her daughter's experience with the Bronze Award. As I usually do with these interview posts, we had a free-flowing discussion which I recorded. I then went back and wrote this post as a Q&A and used Chris Lynn's words to answer questions I wrote while writing the post.
Chris Lynn is the leader of her daughter's troop, a multi-level troop that includes girls from Brownies to Cadettes.
Q: Did all of your girls work on the Bronze Award?
A: No, only four were Juniors and of them, only two chose to work on the Bronze Award.
Q. Which Journey did you to do prepare?
A. We did the Outdoor Journey because it is always the low hanging fruit. For the TAP they cleared some trails at our camp and developed some trail maps--kind of the long term education sustainability approach. Then they did aMuse. For the TAP they did a survey on bullying talked about what they were seeing in the district and then provided the district some educational materials. Even though there's a bullying issue in our school district, they like to put their heads in the sand about it so they are not going to use it because "We don't have that problem". So they went through all that effort with the TAP and had it fail, but I still considered it a success.
Q: Do you think the Journey was helpful in preparing them to do Bronze?
A: The Journey itself? No. The TAP? Absolutely. I almost see the Journey and TAP as two separate functions. The book Journeys like Amuse, Breathe, all of those take a lot of effort to put life into them and to get engagement, and the TAP has never ever, in my mind related to the content of what we've done. We spent all this great time talking about breaking boundaries and famous women and and then we did a TAP on bullying. We stepped back and looked for gaps in our community and that's what we found. Every time I do a TAP I talk about doing a good project, not necessarily about the theme of the Journey.
Q. Did you find that the Journey programming itself was helpful, or were you just checking a box by doing it?
A. The Journey itself--checking a box.
Q: If I put you in charge of Girl Scouts and you got to make the decision about whether the Bronze, Silver and Gold Awards should require Take Action Projects vs. service projects needing a certain number of hours, which would you pick?
A: TAPs. The extra level of sustainability is something that takes the girls from thinking about "Okay, here's this cute little project to do" to "This is me making an impact in my community."
Q: Don't service projects make an impact?
A: Oh, they make an impact, but not sustainable. I like the concept of a project living on rather than saying "Okay, we did a food drive, we got a truckload of stuff for our local food pantry. It took us 50 hours to do that. Great. " But then in a year, what's going to happen when the food pantry is empty again?
Q: Hypothetically, because I'm making this up on the fly, you go to the food pantry and they say that what they could really use is a sign out front. It takes enough hours to make and install that sign. Is it a service project, or a TAP?
A: It's a TAP because that sign is there for a longer period of time. It's not used once and then thrown away. You've done it once and they're going to use it on a going forward basis until such a time that they need to replace that sign again.
Q: What if they asked you to paint the food pantry? Is that service or a TAP?
A: I'd require my girls to add something else. I'd tell them "We painted the food pantry, can we do something else to help the food pantry like create a flyer or something else? That's a little bit more than just a one time paint the food pantry project. For the Bronze, I would want to see that extra level of thinking of how we made an impact and how it can have a lasting impact.
Q: You read the same Facebook groups I do. You know that the topic of whether the higher awards or Journeys should require service or TAPs makes the rounds every so often, and that the sustainability issue seems to be the one that gives people trouble. Some service projects are short, easy, one and done in an afternoon type of things, and I get that we don't give higher awards for these small projects. But there are other projects where girls put a lot into learning how to do or make something that was requested by an organization, that the project is what the group asked for and needed by the group and which is a one and done. The sustainability seems to be the big issue.
A: If you spend hours and hours learning how to do something, the sustainability is pretty easy to hit with developing a flyer or a skit. That demonstrates what you've learned and helps teach others. If you learn something, it's an easy easy way to make that twist that into a TAP.
Q: So what did your girls do for Bronze?
A: They did a cyber security class for second and third graders. They worked with the FBI, got all these links with homeland security and developed a program on internet safety. They discussed phishing and viruses and passwords. They developed about an hour presentation of 45 to 50 slides. It took them two hours just to decide that this is what they were going to do. Once they decided what they were going to do, it was kind of off to the races. We did 10 hours of research. We created the presentation and then practiced for another four hours. Then we spent another four to six hours presenting at the different elementary schools in the area.
Q: How did your troop come about?
A: I took everyone on the local wait list and formed a troop of about fourteen girls, Daisy through Cadette.
Q: Who came up with this idea for this cyber security project and what was the genesis? Tell me about that?
A: Our council, Greater Iowa, does a lot of really good Bronze Award training. I went to our leader retreat, and they spent an hour with me walking through things like drawing a picture of your neighborhood and then talking about who is in your neighborhood and what the neighborhood needs? So I took the girls to a local bar and grill and took it over. We had some appetizers and just put sticky notes on the wall . We listed people in our community like our teachers , our piano teachers, our town, our dance studios, our doctors, and more. Once we figured out what everyone's community was we looked at the problems, and they put them up on red sticky notes. We have problems within the school community with bullying. In the library community there are problems with kids who don't know cybersecurity. Once we got 10 red stickies up there with different problems on them, the girls looked at me and said we're doing cyber-security. While my training said that we should take two or three of the problems and spend about 25% of our Bronze Award time discerning what we were going to do by talking to community members, these girls wouldn't budge--they said they were doing a cyber-security class.
Q: You know what they say about girl-led!
A: We reached out to the FBI and Homeland Security and got a lot of support out of both departments, and that checked our box on meeting or interfacing with other people. Then we went into research and that drove itself. It was areally really easy process. It's still 20 hours, and it wears a lot on the leader to have to have 20 hours worth of meetings. Next year with 50 for Silver that's going to be even less fun. I know I have at least one who wants to do Silver and I think I have three plus one who will be working on the Bronze Award.
Q: So you spend your meetings working on the higher awards?
A: We meet every other week as a troop, and on the off weeks, I meet with the girls doing the higher awards.
Q: Can you tell me more about the project?
A: The girls did their research and put together over 200 slides. We then started talking about how one slide or another had good information, but that it was something we didn't need, and while we started off looking at all aspects of cyber-security, we ended up focusing on viruses, phishing and passwords, because we just had too much information to cover everything.
Q: How well was the presentation received by the kids at school?
A: We presented at two different schools. At the first school, the principal made attendance mandatory and the girls presented twice, to two different groups of kids. The first time the school forgot to set up a monitor for the girls so they had to present from memory without visual aids. The second time was a lot easier! At the second school, attendance was not mandatory and principal was not as supportive, and I was not allowed to attend, so I'm not sure how it went.
Q: Do you think the girls grew through this process?
A: Yes. It was huge. My daughter is autistic and I never thought putting her up in front of a room full of people was going to be within her capabilities. It made me cry when I saw her do it the first time. Another one of my girls is really reserved and it was good to see her in front of a room of people and actually engaging with people. I saw a lot of growth from her.
Q: It is amazing that they chose to do a presentation like that as a project.
A: Yeah, it floored me when they came up with the concept, but they pulled it off. My daughter took it to the county fair and got a blue ribbon for the effort!
Q: In your council, what is involved in getting the Bronze Award?
A: We're a little bit more formal than a lot of others. There is a proposal process. We have to provide plans, five or six sentences about what we're going to do and how we think we're going to spend the hours. We send it in and then they just had somebody who rubber stamps it. In our council training, they said that with the Bronze Award we're not going to reject anything, unless it's really, obviously not going to work. Once they give you the green light then it's on us to log our hours and to be honest and fair about the whole project.
At the end of the project we have to provide pictures proving that we did something. If you were building a sign, you'd have to have pictures of you building the sign. There is a one-page form to fill out saying what you did and the hours it took. As leader I have to certify that I'm not lying about the hours. Within three or four days of sending the paperwork to council, I had the final sign off and approval.
Q: You said your council had bronze award training for the leaders?
A: Yes, they do. We have an annual leaders retreat in Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa and one of the tracks, they always offer is higher awards and they walk you through how the Gold Award site works and what level of ownership you need to have as a leader for Bronze and Silver and they answer any questions. They had the people who do the approvals in the room with us so we could talk to them about. Well what are you really going to approve? And I'm going to pin them down this fall about Silver.
Q: Do you have any idea how many girls usually earn the Gold Award in a given year in your council?
A: About 25 girls per year.
Q. A few years ago I did some research looking at council annual reports. Of the councils where I could find information (I make no representations that the sample was random or representative of Girl Scouts nationwide--I just looked at councils until I found some with the information I was seeking easily available and quit when I had "enough") I saw that about six percent of Girl Scouts are Seniors and Ambassadors. In 2021 your council had 9154 girls. Six percent of that is 529. I also looked at my council and figured that about 10% of eligible girls earn Gold. Using the same math I used during that post, your council's numbers are closer to 19%, so they must be doing something right.
A: Yes, they are supportive, and they encourage us to discuss the scholarships available to those who earn the Gold Award.
Q: Do you think your daughter is going to try to earn the Silver Award?
A: Yes, she's my one definite. I think the other girl that did Bronze with her is also going to do Silver and I have high hopes that there's one other girl who is currently a Cadette will hop on and do Silver as well. I also have at least one girl doing Bronze so I'll be working with her as well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Chris Lynn's girls are lucky to have a leader like her.
If you'd like to talk to me about your daughter's experience with the higher awards (or your troop's experience), good, bad or otherwise, drop me an email at ruthjoec at aol.com.
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