This is one in a series of posts about a survey I did of members of a number of Facebook groups for Girl Scout leaders. The other posts published to date are:
- Survey Results: Badges
- Comments re GSUSA Programming
- Daisy Journeys and TAPs
- Survey Results: Journeys and TAPs
- Survey Results: What I Ordered, What I Got
- Your Turn to Talk About Badges
- Your Turn to Talk About Take Action Projects
While I have other posts summarizing the data as a whole, this post is looking at what they said about Brownie Journeys and TAPs--Take Action Projects.
Do Troops Do Journeys?
GSUSA's original idea is that troops would spend most of their year on their Journey, with much of the programming tied into it. Badges, camping and cookies were "side trips" but the year's goal was the end of the Journey. That has never become a reality.
My survey asked those who had Brownies last year what their girls earned, and of about 75 people who responded to one of the items (not a professional survey designer, did not put "none" as a possible response), 21 troops earned one Journey, twenty troops did 2 and nine troops earned 3-5 Journeys.
Are TAPs Appropriate for Brownies?
According to my read of GSUSA materials, Journeys are GSUSA's leadership curriculum and the overarching goal of the whole Journey program is to teach girls how to execute a Take Action Project--or in shorthand, a TAP. What is a TAP? The definition I've gleaned from GSUSA's materials is that a Take Action Project is one in which girls identify a need or problem, learn about things relating to the need or problem, preferably from people in the community who deal with it, and then design and implement a sustainable solution to that problem.
Given that definition, 82 people did not believe they were appropriate for Brownies, 30 said they were appropriate and 94 said they might be appropriate for some Brownies. Given that definition, 70 said their Brownie troop had done a TAP properly; 86 said they had not.
How Are Take Action Projects Chosen?
At this time, there are three types of Journeys. The original Journeys were developed about 15 years ago to be the backbone of a year's programming. They used a process of "Discover, Connect, Take Action" and were correlated with Common Core. On the Brownie level, the original plans called for reading a story about some Brownies and a tree house and doing some activities, culminating with the TAP.
The Think Like a _____ journeys each teach a way of thinking based on a STEM topic, and then, if you follow the VTK scripts, use that way of thinking to conceive, plan and implement a TAP.
Finally there is an Outdoor Journey, put in at the demand of the membership, which is simply three particular outdoor-related badges, followed by a TAP.
I asked how people who did the original Journeys with Brownie picked their TAP and gave people five choices. 116 people responded as follows:
I asked the same question about the Think Like a Journeys, and all of the 65 people who responded picked one of my choices.
79 people responded about the Outdoor Journey
What Take Action Projects Do Brownies Do?
- Made rain barrels and educated on their use
- Poster project about a local endangered species that they presented in their classes at school and to parents
- Created maps and information of all public trails in Township, made a packet for all troops in town with challenges to complete on a visit
- Made posters with the Leave No Trace rules (attended JID)
- Posters
- We made kindness rocks to share with others. I forget the other project.
- Decorated reusable water bottles (WOW), made friendship bracelets spelling WATER (WOW another time), video about citizen science (TLACS), improve a geocache (Outdoor Journey), coat collection (one of the old journeys)
- Outdoor Letter Boxes
- Slide show of leave no trace principals for other troops to show their girls
- Building bat houses
- Volunteer at local food bank
- Butterfly garden to attract pollinators (Outdoor Journey), video/flyers handed out at cookie booths advocating for dual flush toilets (Wonders of Water), purchased sports equipment for an after-school program to promote physical fitness for all girls (World of Girls), video to encourage others to do citizen Scientist projects by demonstrating how easy it is and the need for research in our local council (TLA Citizen Scientist)
- Neighborhood clean-up
- They made a bee hotel for a local farm
- Bookmarks to the library, smile bags for school counselors, make and donate animal toys for shelter and add brochures to go along with it
- Make bat houses, replanted flowers at a camp, made videos on engineering
- Educational posters, donations and built a play area for goats at wildlife refuge
- Citizen Science--SciStarter. They've started outdoor, no tap yet.
- Making cat toys for Cat Room at PetCo
- Rolling library for a children’s hospital
- Sidewalk chalk with reminders to put away litter and positive affirmations; planting native flowers
- Bike to school Day- planned an event and spread the word
- Clothing drives
- WoW--educated public about plastic in the ocean and handed out biodegradable straws at a coffee shop, outdoor journey--painted signs around town about keeping road drains clear of debris, think like a citizen scientist--made an education video about the importance of bees to our food sources
- World of Water: They drafted announcements for a period of a week to educate the school. They hung up fliers and at the end, the whole school received reusable water bottles.
- A "clean up" initiative at the elementary school cafeteria to get kids to take care of their own lunch trash
- Our girls were losing interest in TAPs by this point. We have lots of very active - hate sitting and talking and researching - so journeys/TAPs did not fit our troop at all.
- So many. Ok made stepping stones for a rescue farm garden and shared about how to donate resources for the farm, made and distributed bird houses including information on where and how to hang them, taught Daisies how to make a catapult, YouTube videos on citizen science and on protecting marine life, raise your hand project encouraging others to speak up against bullying and for themselves, made dioramas for display locally teaching about camping and leave no trace, made video games in scratch about leave no trace, during Covid made useful items from recycled materials for the family, did the citizen scientist project ant picnic.
- They helped clean up an existing garden at the school we met at and planted pollinator friendly plants
- Multilevel- the girls decided to take the education route for their projects. They each created a mini poster for different aspects of the lesson on a piece of printer paper and then glued them all to a trifold presentation board. Practiced what they were going to say for each part. Then presented the information to a local veterans group, as well as posting the information on social media to further educate.
- Video on LNT
- For the Outdoor Journey, we learned about First Aid at camp. The girls helped create a display about First Aid to display at the fall SU cookie rally.
- Letter writing campaign about the environment
- Data collection for science website, social media video for women’s hospital access, water conservation posters for school staff and grocery staff bathrooms.
- Little Free Library, STEM kits with built in science fair project, created and taught how to make toys for enrichment zone at the local animal shelter
- Donations for animal shelter; gift donations and wrapping for families in need
- Posters, videos shared with the school cohort to share key elements
- Stop smoking campaign
- Community education on litter education with litter clean up day promoted to GS troops, poster education project on female inventors, tie-dye masks to give out with inspiration notes at the beginning of COVID to spread community joy.
- They made a video explaining Leave No Trace and we shared it on our council fb page.
- #1 Solving kids being isolated in hospital during COVID - made fleece blankets for comfort and taught others how to make them. #2 Why animals end up in shelters, research causes and solutions, wrote to town council to add pet food to local food banks since cost for pet food is a root cause of forfeiting pets.
- Brownies worked on cleaning waterways in our state park
- We did blessing bags for homeless.
- Brownies added Daisies with educational posters and “enhanced” collection sites for animal shelter donations; Brownie Quest.
- Planted bee gardens
- Neighborhood cleanup and education at their school
- Currently making a book about the outdoors and will be given to others
- Outdoor- made bat houses for our local GS camp. Created education material to leave at camp for other troops to understand bat safety. Committed to cleaning them out next year or taking them down if they’re not used.
- WoG- book drive with info about the importance of stories, and made bookmarks out of old cookie boxes with each girls favorite reading recommendations. Donated to the free store.
- WOW- performed skits they wrote about water myths and the importance of water across cultures for a group of other GS
- Citizen science- did another sci starter project following their directions
- Posters on leave no trace
- All levels pitched in to clean up flower beds in a low income housing community
- We did call to action posters that we could put up around the school.
- Educational poster
- Planted a school garden. Made posters about women in engineering to post at school
- Collecting additional data for citizen science
- Informational posters hung at the library and in the elementary school, building a firewood shed at the GS camp
- Bookmarks for library; water conservation poster; don’t remember the other
- For the brownie quest, the girls broke into small groups to come up with ideas, they presented, then we voted. I assisted by interacting with the school principal to get approval, and printing off options for supplies to vote on, but the girls did the rest. The project was to build a reading nook for the school library to encourage reading because all the school had in there were desk chairs. For the outdoor journey I have two simple options to vote on mostly because the troop only has enough energy to go all out on one TAP at a time.
- We made a video about different ideas to save water, helped to weather- proof benches at the lake at camp (outdoor journey), and made blankets for the children’s hospital
- We made posters to advocate for funding of a new park. The posters were brought to a city council meeting. The project was led by a troop parent.
- Pandemic related
- Homeless car bags , ant research
- They made signs in their houses about conserving water
- Storm drain education using city materials
- We revitalize a meditation garden at our meeting place
- Recycling education program at school; teaching Daisies LNT principles
- My coleader selected the project because we were short on time (normally we do allow the girls to vote on several options). We made boredom buster kits for kids in the hospital -- the idea being that we identified a problem and solved it. It was a pretty loose interpretation of a TAP....
- The girls did a presentation about saving water at their All School meeting
- The first two promoted awareness and collected donations (of items) for an animal shelter.
- The third was done solo Juliette style and she did everything (including scripting her video) but didn't get her video recorded. She was raising awareness of the value and need for clean water and how Flint, Michigan was suffering from a significant water crisis.
- Created a slideshow of service unit encampment pictures for new troops to the service unit
- It’s been a while. But I remember that my daughter was the only one who completed the outdoor journey TAP. She was concerned about plastic waste and commented when she saw how much there was when I was getting ready for a Court of Awards for our troop. I suggested she could send a letter to GSUSA about the badge packaging and that is what she did - and she’s very disappointed to not have heard back.
- Planted trees
- Kindness rocks as a way to encourage people to get outdoors, skit for Daisy troops on Design process
- Bookmarks, Commercials
- Mapped veterans graves at an historic cemetery using data collection; created hiking program for other troops; completed a water quality stream survey
- Made blessing bags for homeless
- Outdoor: Our Girl Scout troop meets at a local park sometimes, and picks up a lot of litter. Sometimes, there's trash on the ground, just inches from a garbage can. The girls wanted to make sure shelters and trails are clean so everyone can enjoy them, and they wanted to donate a fancy, new trash can, but our contact at the park asked if we could paint the trash cans that were already there instead and they agreed. Each girl "adopted" a can either solo or in a team of 2 and painted it with pictures and encouraging words to make it a lot harder to miss! For example, the trash can on the basketball court got turned into a basket encouraging people to "dunk" their trash and keep the park clean, and the one near the head of the walking trail got painted with cute puppies and encouragement to dispose of litter and dog poo properly to keep the trail clean for human and dog feet. For their Think Like A journey, they wanted to inspire other girls to be scientists, so they made bookmarks and worked with our children's librarian to put bookmarks into biographies of famous female scientists, encouraging them to consider science careers. My girls did solo projects other TAPs - we tried to decide on one to do as a troop and it devolved into chaos and hurt feelings, so everyone did their own thing.
- Clean up of a local river
- Mostly educational I think
- Save the bee video for playing at school
- Made reusable bags from old t-shirts and led an after-school workshop to make them. (They keep teaching others how to do these, and they are Ambassadors now. WOW really inspired them.)
- Made displays for the school about conserving water.
- One was a Journey in a day, the girls planted trees afterwards, we made a video on conserving water and shared with family/friends, we also helped with a local diaper drive and handed out information at our cookie booths on the program.
- Beach clean up (which the girls actually came up with), painting benches at camp
- Clean up school property
- Our brownie take action was to work with a local group organizing a stream cleanup
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