Growth Through the Bronze Award

This is the second post regarding my interview with Sarah about the Bronze Award. In the first post we talked about her troop's Bronze Award project.

This post is going to focus on the growth the girls experienced because of the Bronze Award.

Q: How would you say working on the Bronze Award has helped your daughter?

A: My daughter has ton of confidence in herself -- she's not a quiet kid, but she's like a social connector. She wants everybody to be happy when two other girls disagree. She's the one that will say "Come on, guys. Let's do this. " She's the compromiser. She spends so much time making sure other people's ideas all get in there and making sure everyone else is feeling included that she doesn't always put her own ideas front and center. So, for her, having the expectation that they each have little pieces where they had to lead and not everything was a total group decision was valuable.

We had a smaller team working on the education part, a group working on the petition, and a group working on the logistics of the event. My daughter worked on the education portion. They talked about doing a poster but then my daughter said "What if we made a reusable bag that had this information, because then they'll see it again and again every time they look at the bag."

She designed which pieces of the education they were going to put on the bag. She was so nervous. She brought this little design that she had written up and drawn and she priced out. She was so nervous to bring that to the troop, because she's not usually the one saying "I think we should do this." She's usually hyping up the other girls.

So for her to be able to say, "Here's what I came up with, this is what I think we should do" and really put herself out there was great. The troop loved it and we did it. Then all of those people at the event took her bag home with them and now she sees them every once in a while out in the community that has been a huge trigger to be like "My ideas are good too." I love that. She's a supporter and I love that about her and I don't want her to lose that, but she had not had a chance where it was her responsibility to have ideas, and in this case we were counting on her to put her stuff out there and it was huge for her.

Q: Awesome, I can see where you'd be proud. Can you say the same about the other girls in the troop?

A. For some of my other girls, having to go to the store manager as a kid and say "I would like you to change how you do business" made them nervous. I have one girl who is so shy and she does not talk even in troop most of the time. I've known her for seven years and she is just very quiet. I was afraid she was going to quit Girl Scouts if I made her do it. I debated whether I should push her or just let her not do it. I was afraid it would make her sick, she's so anxious. But you know what? She stepped up, and she did it, and she came out of there. She just talked about it, but there's a big smile on her face and that was one of the businesses that did change their practices. And her mom still talks about that. I know she's not going to talk about it, but I know that changed her confidence and gave her a chance to speak up and do what she would never have done on her own.

Q. I'm impressed. You keep hearing about the higher awards as leadership awards, and I guess I've always seen them as awards for girls who are leaders, not as awards that can make leaders.

A. Really, I love that kind of result. Amazing isn't it?

Q. It is. You’ve done a great job with those girls!

A. I love them. It's almost all them. They're just amazing kids. They would be getting good stuff from Girl Scouts, even if we had not done the Bronze. I don't think this is the only way they build that confidence or they get that leadership, but in this particular instance, it went so well and they all got something.

Q. That's really cool. Well, if I made you in charge of everything, would you keep the Bronze Award the way it is, or would you change it?

A. For me, it worked really well. I liked that I didn't have to have it all planned out ahead of time before we started it, because they did come up with so many good ideas. I do understand why the Silver has more requirements, so, I think it worked really well and I don't know what I would change because it worked well, but I also know that it doesn't work for everyone.

Q. The big thing you hear again and again with the higher awards is service versus take action and whether girls should be able to do service projects for the highest awards.

A. We have really good council staff that explained it in a way that I felt like it was manageable and I heard them giving that kind of feedback. For example, if the girl proposed a service project, they would say "That's a great idea and...." and help the girl expand her service to take action instead of "No, no, no, no, no" so maybe instead of the changing the award I would help the council staff give better feedback. If everybody could have the experience I had with the support we got, I think they would understand the materials better.

Q: You said that your background you understood where the Journeys were going, for lack of a better word. I worked with the program and read the directions, and it wasn't until the Think Like a Journeys came out that I figured out the the whole point of all of these things was the take action project and teaching them how to do a take action project and how to think about it and all of that as opposed learning the content area of the Journey. Did you figure that out early on, or did it take you a while?

A. I think it was in a survey you did for your blog or one of your posts. One of the choices you gave or one of the comments that came out made me realize that when they were Daisies. I didn't have them do that whole analysis.

So for Flower Garden, we did that for just our rising second graders because we only only had one year as a Daisy for that group and we really just wanted to get all the flower petals. Then my daughter read about or heard about the Summit Awards and she said she wanted it. I told her it meant she had to do this extra Journey thing, and that we don't have time to do it with the whole troop, as they still have a whole other year of Daisies so I'm not rushing them through. So we did it just for five girls that were finishing Daisies. It worked nicely as a wrap-up to Daisies because since they only had one year, we just used it to review the law, but I didn't like the plan of it and could not have done it over a long period of time.

For the take action, what we said was, okay, the school has a garden and they said you can do whatever we want in one of these beds. We asked the girls what they thought was important at school, and for the kids when they see this bed. We asked what they thought they could do, what would make school better. And they said they thought Girl Scouts was really important and they wanted everyone to learn about the Girl Scout Law because it's really important. They got the point of Discover-- the Law is important.

So, we had this space. And now, you know, you've decided you want to teach about the law? One idea was to do painted rocks with parts of law on them. Another was to do bee houses and to put the Law on them, and so we talked about whether it was a good idea to do bee houses and to attract bees to the playground. We took pieces of their ideas and gave them only a few choices about how we were going to do them. In the end they did do the bee houses as far enough away from the school we made them go to the principal to talk about it. They each wrote a line of the Girl Scout Law and sealed it up and we put it on the bee houses. The Girl Scout law is visible on the playground and it helps pollinator. We did it in a couple of meetings and it lasted a few years until the weather took it down but a lot of kids saw the Girl Scout Law for those years. Okay. That was our first TAP, and it was nice because we didn't do it till the very end. I did it with a small amount of kids, so I could kind of tailor it more, without as many girls throwing out ideas. The girls who did the project felt like they planned it and that they did it but they didn't plan all of it and they didn't have to make it be the most changing project of all time.

Even if we do projects that are just for our families--you know I have 14 girls now. So that's actually a lot of people when you think about multiple parents, a grandparent here or there, and all the siblings that have been dragged to watch these things.

Other projects reach more people, like the website we designed that 600 people saw. So there's some things we do that are big. Some that are small--and I think being open to not having every TAP take 50 hours and be a huge overwhelming thing has really helped. We can say "What can we manage right now?" That makes a difference. This troop is so passionate about service, so it is their passion that leads the whole thing because they want to do service. My younger daughter's troop doesn't seem to have that passion, so we may not do it again for her. They may not do their Bronze and that's okay.

Q. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

A. You are welcome. I guess my reason for wanting to share is not to toot my own horn, but to just say that I've had really good support from my council and a great experience with my girls and I'd like folks who wonder if it is possible to know that it is.

If your troop has had a really great or really awful time with the higher awards, I'd love to interview you.  Please email me at ruthjoec at  aol.com