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Ruth: To pick up where we left off, and to go back to the question I asked earlier: I can see that the goals of the Journey program are good, but even you admit that the published programming isn't the best. How do I as a leader make Journeys what they should be, rather than a chore or a hoop we have to jump through?
Nicole: I teach a class that's a three hour deep dive into like what Girl Scouting is and why we do it and how we do it. And it's one that I recommend to everybody after they get their feet under them and have their first few good months of getting to know their troop. And we dive not only into the three processes, but the other side of the Girl Scout Leadership Experience--discover connect take action-- because you're already doing those in the badges without as much focus on the take action portion. But the most gratifying thing for me as a training specialist is when people walk away saying, "I'm so much less anxious, I'm so excited to get started with this." I've had people walk out and buy lifetime memberships because this is just a distillation of what Girl Scouting is. The Journey is the blueprint on how to do it and GSUSA is sometimes really bad at putting things out there, so it needs a an in-person kind of, um, facilitator and that grassroots mentor network that I think Girls Scouts is really great at to make sure that we're all learning and growing in facilitating these things just as much as our Girl Scouts are.
Emily: Hi, I'm Emily, Nicole's partner and wife. She gets into this very excited stage and she is wonderful and so good at talking about these things.
Ruth: I love the enthusiasm in her voice, you can tell she loves this stuff.
Emily: I think you missed two really important things here. First, the course is called Proficiency Badges and Journeys, but it's actually called pb and j. And it's all about how you can't have a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich without all of the parts. Proficiency badges are really good at teaching you to discover a new idea and connect it back to your own life. Certainly some troops take that to a take action place and do service and do projects in the community, but Journeys, have that piece built in. It's actually required to take it to that third step, which isn't required for most badges-- to do service to your community, to help to do those things. Juliette Gordon Low said that to earn a badge in something you should be proficient enough in it to be able to provide service in it. I really love that Journeys kind of require that. Like, you could do a badge, you could learn about animal care, and then we do service in it, but you can't do a Journey about animal care and not give back to your community.
Ruth. If I recall, the TAP for the Daisy 3 Cheers Journey is a skit for parents showing what they learned about taking care of themselves and animals. Where is the giving back to the community in that?
Nicole: I’m not sure I’m familiar with suggested TAPs for Journeys - when I do them with girls we go by what experiences they had during the Discover and Connect activities, and what interested them. But everything we do in Girl Scouting is a progression - and I love the Components of a Take Action Project image from GSRV. If Daisies were passionate about sharing what they learned about caring for animals and how it mirrored how they could care for themselves, then sharing that information with friends and family - especially if they can share with their peers or younger family members - is a great first Take Action Project that builds the skills of working together to educate your community to solve community problems. It seems simple, but it’s building critical skills!
Ruth: I'm sitting here looking at this as somebody who has not been a Girl Scout all her life. I'm the helium-handed mama who realized that somebody needs to do this. So I come in and I'm given a Journey book and told that this is the best thing to start with.
Emily: The point that you're pointing out is just that these are not grab and go, which I think goes back to Nicole's point about just how important it is to have valuable training and mentorship in Girl Scouts. And that is a failure on GSUSA's part. I think that there's a failure on GSUSA's part to make this program grab and go. But the reality is, that to give quality programming to young people, you cannot be an untrained person with a piece of paper, you have to be trained at least. You're right, the Journeys make dumb suggestions, they have bad lesson plans. The concept is truly very strong but
Ruth: They are not getting the concept across!
Emily: Because they want to say they’re grab and go, but it's not grab and go because good programming can't be grab and go, so they try to make it grab and go but like they just make bad suggestions and they make it so that it's not ever going to be girl led. If you grab a paper and read off a bit, it's not girl led. I think what you're reacting to is very natural. If you follow the suggestions on those activities like they suck, they suck super much. But the concept of about learning a concept in depth, connecting it to your own life and taking action in your community, based on age-appropriate concepts, like water for brownies and energy for juniors with the get moving journey, I think it's super valuable.
Ruth: But isn't what you are doing is telling me that broccoli is good for me and delicious and then giving me a recipe that tells me to boil it for 20 minutes or until pale green? Is it any wonder that I hate the stuff? Is it any wonder that I don't want to try your recipe for spinach, nor do I believe you when you tell me it's good?
Emily: You're right, those things suck. And I still like them. I still like them, I just use a lot of creative approaches and how I do it and that helps me a lot. But they are not grab and go. If GSUSA wanted to make them grab and go, they failed.
Nicole: The grab and go concept is really at odds with being girl-led. As a training specialist, I think what I need to do is to teach leaders to cook the broccoli. When I took the the PB+J training guide from Texas, there was baked into it a lot of "I know everyone hates the Journeys and here's how we're going to get through this together." I've seen a decrease in that as the Think Like a Journeys have been out and have been refined a little bit.
Also, what gives me hope is...have you seen the new Daisy programming? They've done away with the flower garden entirely, which I'm very excited about. The new Daisy programming is decent in my mind, and it is written in a physical handbook, with one version for girls to work through as their own copy of the book and then, in the back, are a bunch of facilitation notes for leaders sharing things like how to actually make it girl-led and experiential and things like that. Knowing that somebody at GSUSA --sometimes I feel like marching into New York to talk to them-- but somebody out there at GSUSA, is on my, on our page and knows a little bit about how kids work. I hope that they're the people who are giving the refresh to those first three journeys.
Hopefully we'll get some leaders who do like vegetables out of that. Our progression toward the Gold Award is not what it needs to be. Honestly. I think why we have such low completion rate of our highest awards is not just because there's a Journey hoop to jump through, but because leaders fundamentally and therefore, their Girl Scouts, don't understand the great concepts behind the bad programming.
Ruth: I sat down the other day with VTK going through the Daisy Flower Garden Journey and reading the script and just like thirteen years ago, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be teaching. Gardening? Different Cultures? The Girl Scout Law? What's the point of this? I mean even with all my experience and everything I've learned about the Journey program since then, I just couldn't figure out what the point of it was--and they had all these scripts telling me how to read a story, and then they tell me to ask the girls what they wanted to do for a Take Action Plan--that's it, no coaching, no set up, no nothing--and none of the materials in VTK under that Journey (I looked at all the plans) told me what a TAP was.
Nicole: The point of having several subjects in the sample Discover and Connect activities is to introduce participants to the breadth of the subject and to find what they’re interested in and passionate about within the subject. You don’t have to do the sample sessions the way they’re written if you know they won’t be interesting to your Girl Scouts.
Yeah. Really, a Take Action Project is just something that is done with the community that will do good after you are done. And at the Daisy level you don't even have to muck around with ideas, like sustainability or anything. You can go to the humane society and while you're there ask for something you can do to help the dogs. Then ask your Daisy's "if we donate food, what's going to happen after they eat all the food?" "They're gonna need more food." "So let's ask our field trip coordinator or whoever what we can do that will last a little bit longer, that we'll do a little bit more good. And you take those baby steps all the way up until your Girl Scouts are 18 or whenever they get tired of it, but hopefully they don't because they get to do whatever they want to do.
Ruth: Ok, but what the shelter really needs is dog food. They don't want a bunch of five and six year olds underfoot and they don't want homemade dog treats or dog toys. Or, on an older girl level, my high school girls can't solve the problem of homelessness but when they went to the homeless shelter, they noticed that the place needed painting. From what I've seen of Gold Award projects, painting the shelter, even if requested to do so by the shelter wouldn't be Gold-worthy, but putting together a talk on homelessness and presenting it to local schools would be.
Nicole: This is where a leader needs to be advocating for their group. Leaders know what their Girl Scouts are capable of, and if a community subject matter expert is underestimating them or can’t commit to assisting with a good Take Action, it’s the adults’ job to help find someone who can help coordinate an age-appropriate TAP. A Take Action Project also doesn’t mean girls can’t or shouldn’t do service projects! Maybe Daisies donate the food to the shelter, and also make posters or videos encouraging people to spay and neuter their pets or to help them realize the big responsibility that owning a pet is (educating on root causes of the issue of overcrowded shelters).
High schoolers probably won’t be solving homelessness, but they can discern city or even state-wide root causes and tackle them. Or, if it’s for a Gold Award level project, they can coordinate community members to help rejuvenate a facility beyond just a new coat of paint.
I have a couple of graphics that I use when teaching about Take Action Projects that you can share with your readers:
Wow. I agree that the underlying concept of a Journey was a great idea. Unfortunately there are 2 problems. 1st the materials from GSUSA are so poorly written to be unusable and 2nd most troop leaders want instant completion of a badge or journey.
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