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?

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.  

How Many Girls Earn the Gold Award?

Every so often a topic that makes the rounds on Girl Scout Facebook groups is our higher awards--the Gold, Silver and Bronze awards--and how they compare, at least prestige-wise to BSA's Eagle.  One thing I've noted over the years both by observation of my parish's troop and by on-line conversations, is that a reasonably high percent of boys (now youth) who stick with BSA through high school seem to earn the Eagle, whereas it seems that few girls earn Gold.

Today I got my council's Annual Report, and I decided to do some math.  For the record, I'm a word person, not a numbers person.  I have made a lot of assumptions in my figures and the post will tell you what those assumptions are, but I'll tell you right now I know they aren't super accurate. They are easy, and I think get me close to where I want to be without needing to borrow my daughter's graphing calculator.

Girl Scouts Louisiana East had 10,281 girl members during the covered year.  Of those 24% were Juniors, 12% were Cadettes, 3% were Seniors and 2% were Ambassadors.