Cleaning Up: Bronze for a Troop

I posted on several Facebook groups for Girl Scout leaders asking for people to contact me if they or their daughters had an extraordinarily good or bad experience with the higher awards.  I've read different times over the years about girls who felt run ragged by council or who felt that much of their project was put in place to please a committee, not to really serve any useful purpose.  No one like that responded to me, but I've had two people reach out about the great time they had with the Bronze Award.  

Sarah, who is from the Columbus Ohio area, reached out to me. We chatted about her daughter's troop's experience with the Bronze Award and I recorded the conversation.  While I have formatted this post as a Q &A, our conversation was more free-flowing, and I composed the questions while writing this post, using Sarah's words as the answers.  

Q:  So tell me about your troop.

A:  I'm one of those kids who moved frequently throughout my childhood, so I never got to be in Girl Scouts, even though I wanted to be.  When my daughter was in first grade another mom came to me and she said "I tried to sign my daughter up for Girl Scouts and they said they don't have a first grade troop, but that they would start it if we are willing to be leaders, do you want to do that?"  I said "I don't  have any idea what that means but sure, let's do it."  We just muddled through, we didn't have enough first graders, immediately, to start a troop so we took kindergarten girls too.  Now we have a split-level troop every other year--though now that we are Cadettes we don't have anyone bridging this year yea!

When we started, all the girls were in a neighborhood public school.  Over the years, girls have moved to other schools but they still come back to us for Girl Scouts.  We really want to keep the girls in the same troop because everything else in their life is changing and this is really important. Any girl that was within driving distance chose to stay in our group.  So we've stayed with almost all the same girls, but now they're at seven different schools and one home school. So we were only in the same school for one year.  The girls really look forward to seeing each other.  For most of them, this is their only time together.

I think each Girl Scout troop has its own culture and its own focus if it is girl-led. This group likes the outdoors and service, which is different from my younger daughter's troop that loves crafts and would craft all the time if they could. While they like to be helpful, they don't have the same drive to service that my older daughter's troop does. 

All 14 of my Juniors did the Bronze Award and  eight of them are working on silver right now.  

Q.  Does your professional background including working with kids?

A.  I'm in higher ed so I teach college.  I also worked as a nanny for a while, taking care of pre-schoolers, which is where I met my husband, who taught pre-school at the time (now he teaches high school).  Also my husband and I both come from large families with tons of cousins so I've been around kids all my life.  

Q.  The first step in the higher awards is to complete a Journey.  What Journey did your girls do? 

A.   We like Journeys, so we do one or two every year.  By the time they were working on their Bronze, they had done their Outdoor Journey and Amuse.

Q:  So Take Action Projects are not a new concept to them?  

A:  No, because we do them so often.  Sometimes they do really small ones and sometimes they do bigger ones.  Amuse is all about skits and stereotypes so they they wrote little skits in groups about stereotypes they thought their own families needed to be educated about and that was just really interesting hearing them think about that because some of them have really traditional grandmas that have very strong gender roles concepts about what a young lady should do. For example, one of them was about crossing your ankles when you sit down  and the girl says "I wear jeans, you can't see anything, you're in jeans".

So then the girls wrote these little skits about the stereotypes they see in their own families and then performed it for all of the families that attended our Court of Award ceremony.  That was a really small circle of impact, but it was all girl-led and they did educate their families about things that felt real in their families. So that was  a small TAP. 

In the past they developed a whole website about another issue that they saw.  They got recycled signs like political signs--they weren't political, but that kind of sign--they got a donation of those, and then spray painted them and  designed a website about recycling. They made a QR code and then each of them painted a sign and put it in their own yards. That way people who walk by in their neighborhood could check out their website.  They have a little counter on the website and it shows they've gotten 600 hits. You know, that's amazing and feels pretty cool. So that was a project with a big impact.  

Q:  Just curious, if I had both the leader's guide and the girl book for Amuse, and a hidden camera in your meeting room that I used to watch you while you were leading Amuse, and I was looking at the books and looking at  you, would they match?  Would I know that's what you were doing?   

A. At least half the time, I think you would be able to say "She's working on this step, and then that one, and now she's tweaking it"  Amuse, I think we did more by the book. I actually like a lot of the Junior level Journeys whereas the Brownie ones were all over the place for me. I feel like I have to change more for Brownies. I felt like the Junior Journeys were right on level for my Juniors.  We're tweaking more of the Cadette stuff because they don't want it to be like school.  

Q:  Do you find the Journey program to be helpful as far as getting your girls into the higher awards?

A:  I'm in education, so the way that they present the material makes sense to my brain.  I spend a lot of time in my professional life taking learning outcomes and teaching them like that. Its the way that I already think in my own world. So it makes sense for me to teach the girls in that way. And my co-leader does not think that way and does not spend that much time. And so I can see very much how for some people, it really frustrating and hard to get into because I don't think we would do as many Journeys if she was the only leader.  But it happens to make sense for the way I think. And so to me they seem pretty straightforward.

Q:  Let's talk about your girls' Bronze Award project.  What did they do?  

A:  For Bronze our troop explored a bunch of different things and decided they were really passionate about litter. They are very outdoorsy and love to be outside, so we do a lot of camping and hiking. 

They like to do like free hikes or go creeking or other outdoor things.  They were noticing that we were going to these beautiful hiking places and they were still finding trash out deep in the woods. Once we were camping and they found a bunch of trash and they were so upset. So they wanted to focus their Bronze Award on litter.

We were exploring community partners and found a local water conservancy group  called Friends of the Lower Olentangy Watershed.  By  learning from that group, they learned that litter eventually makes its way to water and so they kind of shifted from  litter pickup to thinking about water conservancy and clean waterways. 

In the end, they did a big event in which they partnered with this group to get all the equipment and to have a trash pick-up.  We cleaned up the creek but they invited all the community partners. They removed 600 pounds of trash out of this waterway.  The girls also invited the media and had gotten publicity about the needs of the area.  They took before pictures and got those in the papers to show how bad our neighborhood waterway had gotten.  At the event they had a petition station and an education station. Everybody that came and volunteered got a chance to learn about the underlying causes of the creeks getting so bad.

My troop figured out that it was because it borders a giant shopping center.  When they did their research the girls figured out that when the dumpsters are getting flipped, trash would fall on the ground.  The problem wasn't really individual people who were littering, it  was this bigger systemic problem with the shopping center trash.  At the event they were educating people about that and then had people sign a petition. 

They got before and after pictures of the area and made a website where more people could sign the petition.  I have 14 girls, so partly our project was so big because they need 20 hours each, and 20X14 is just a lot of needed enough work, right? The project didn't have to be this big, but it was  because   they needed their time. So then they took that petition and the education materials and they split up and went to all of the businesses at the shopping center and had meetings with the managers and  suggested changes to the trash practices so that the creek wouldn't ever get so bad again. One of the suggestions that they had was to have paid hours for their staff to come on trash pickup afternoon after the trash is picked up and just clean up whatever falls before it has time to wash away.  They were able to get five of the businesses to agree to do that. It was really impactful for them.

I think the before and after of the trash cleanup felt good but when they were able to  understand that they had changed the businesses' future practices so that, as the girls keep saying,  "It'll never happen again."  As adults we know they didn't get every business to change, but they still did a lot, and I think they understand that some progress is better than none.  It's been almost two years and we are still able to still see that the whole parking lot is cleaner and that as a result, the creek is still cleaner. It's not perfect, but it's still way cleaner.    

Q.  That's really cool.  

A.  We know that a new manager can come in and change that and undo the progress made, so to that extent it's not sustainable in the sense that it is now forever fixed, but it has made a big difference in the last almost two years.    

Q.  It really sound like your girls did the kind of project GSUSA is looking for.  What does your council require for Bronze? 

A.  For Bronze, not a lot. They really want to make it like accessible. I took it so seriously and I probably did more than I needed to to help them cross the t's and dot the i's and I probably over prepared them.  I took that sustainability part really seriously and really pushed them.  After we cleaned up the trash, it would have been enough to educate the families that came to the event to meet the sustainability requirement, but I was the one that said that's not going to be sustainable enough. Let's take it to this business. I'm glad I did because they're really proud of themselves.  But, back to your question, in my council, you don't have to have a proposal. You do have to have the time logs. And each girl does submit her reflection where she answers questions like  "What did I learn?" , "What would I do differently?" ,  "What was my job?: and "How did I contribute?" We submitted that plus our material, giving them a copy of the petition and the educational materials that the girls had made. 

Thanks Sarah for taking the time to visit with me.  We spoke for quite a while and so I’m going to break our conversation into two or more posts.  I have to say that I’m quite impressed with her troop’s project.