Girl Scout Leaders: Your Turn to Talk about Take Action Projects

 

All too often it seems there is a disconnect between what the folks from GSUSA send us and what boots on the ground leaders and girls are looking for.  As a blogger, I get information for some of my posts by posting surveys on Facebook groups for Girl Scout leaders.  Recently I posted one asking questions about the program in general, and at the end, I had a free space that allowed posters to say whatever they wanted.  This post is a compilation of  some of those responses.  A lot of my survey addressed Take Action Projects, and many of the comments left dealt with them.  Below are the comments I have received on Take Action Projects. 

TAP have their place but GS puts TAP on fun patches. Just stop. Why can’t we just have fun. Not everything we do has to change the world. It feels like so much pressure for girls to think we have to be the ones to change the world.

I think it needs to build with a start at service projects for the Daisy/ Brownies. The girls I have worked with just have not been able to really identify problems and they need help with every step. But they can do a lot for teaching and getting others involved.

I think that the TAPs for Daisies and Brownies are inappropriate for their developmental age. Juniors start to get it, but need heavy guidance.

My personal opinion is the TAPs for younger girls (elementary age) are too much. If my girls do 3 TAPs each level to earn a summit award, it feels a lot like they are working on something that will require someone else to maintain. It's passing the issue off onto someone else to deal with. It certainly makes it harder to do Journey in a Day type activities for our entire Service Unit when we have to find someone else to take over the maintenance of whatever the girls create during the Journey in the Day. It feels like we're pushing responsibility off to other people instead of actually helping our community. I'd rather the journeys have service components and leave the take action portion to just the bronze, silver, and gold awards.

We do a lot of Journeys and that has been helpful in building the TAP thinking. We do a mix of big in- depth and small easy projects, and over the years it’s really clicked with the girls. They had no problems with Bronze and are cruising through Silver.

I really think for younger girls TAP are super tough and more busy work compared to what they get out of it; however, my Brownies understood these concepts much more concretely. I think these are important, but for daisies too overwhelming and time consuming.

The TAPS are absurd at the younger levels, but if they are done correctly at the older levels they prepare the girls for the higher awards.

When it comes to TAP’s they need some guidelines of what to do exactly. I need to be able to bring ideas and choices to my troop. Just saying what a TAP is and to come up with their own idea would never had happened. We never made it through a full journey in Brownies, now we are juniors and I have 4 who completed a Journey and now I have to figure out how to explain to them they need to do a TAP and come up with something. I have no idea how to do it with part of the troop or even when to do it. I have to lead meetings for all the girls. It’s overwhelming being a leader sometimes. (Blogger note:  Go to GSUSA's store and buy the Think Like a Citizen Scientist download; it does a better job than anything else I've seen GSUSA put out of leading the girls through the TAP process.)

I personally have no issue with Take Actions - they are pretty simple to execute. I think the new Journeys are far better than the original ones which my scouts have found so repetitive and boring that we never got through more than two meetings (with the exception of the Senior Sow What Journey, although I made some very different choices to have a much more immersive experience with that one).

TAP as currently implemented actually seems to take away agency and accomplishment from the girls since so much ends up being “education”.  If a girl coordinates a neighborhood beach cleanup and gets 100 people involved and permission from the county, it doesn’t “count” as a tap because it’s not sustainable. If a girl makes a 10 minute video about how it’s important to clean up the beach and posts it online where no one will watch it, that “counts” as a sustainable tap. Which one taught her more leadership skills? Which one got Girl Scouts more involved in their community? Which one made the world a better place?

Journeys are just a chore and no one likes them, leaders or girls. We've done best with the Outdoor or Think Like ones because they fit better into a multi level troop, but they do not naturally lead girls into a TAP. Let's drop the journey and TAP connection, keep them separate. You can still require a TAP for higher award, but my girls would be more excited to work on a longer TAP of they hadn't just spent 6 meetings on a journey.