Discovering Girl Scout Journeys!

Are you ready to go on a journey of discovery with Girl Scouts? To identify a problem in your community and put a plan into action to make a difference? If that’s you, then we’ve got the perfect Girl Scout resource for you: the Journeys!

These important resources allow girls to Discover more about the world around them by guiding them as they dive into a topic related to the Journey’s theme, Connect with organizations and people in their community and the world, identify a problem and make a plan to Take Action to make a positive impact on that problem.  When girls complete the Journey they’ll earn awards that they can proudly display on their sash or vest and the knowledge that they have the power to make a difference in our world. Now that’s what Girl Scouts is all about!

So what is a Journey? Journeys are resources and awards that encourage girls to dive into a topic as girls discover things, make connections, and take action to make the world a better place! Sound simple? It can be and to help with that we’ve got some great resources to use as your embark on your Journey.

Journeys have two main resources, the Adult Guide and the Girl Book that you’ll need to complete the awards. Daisies, Brownies,and Juniors can also use the meeting plans and outlines in the Volunteer Toolkit for our It’s Your Planet-Love It! and It’s Your Story-Tell It! Journeys. Here are a few tips to remember as you start your Journey.

1. Use the Girl Book like a journal. Each one contains cool stories and fun activities designed to lead each girl on her own adventure as she learns about the topic and how it relates to her world. Having the girls read the girl book and complete the activities in it does not complete the requirements for the Journey. These books are meant for the girl to use along with the activities in the adult guide so you’ll need both.
2. Use the Adult Guide as your road map to earning the Journey awards. Look for the page that shows the awards and what is required to earn each award. Check out the sample meeting sessions as these are a great resource for ideas on how to complete the award requirements.
3. Don’t be intimidated by the sample meetings content. Remember Journeys are designed to be customizable! You can switch out activities in the sample meetings for a guest speaker, a visit to a community partner, or an activity you found that fits the theme but isn’t directly mentioned in the sample meetings.
4. Take the Journey at your own pace. Some troops follow the 8 sample sessions over the course of 8 meetings, some combine meetings with other badge related meetings, and some spread out the Journey activities over the course of the troop year. Stick with whatever works best for engaging your girls.

You’ve completed the Journey when girls have completed the requirements for each award listed in the award descriptions and finished your Take Action project. It’s truly that simple. So what are you waiting for? Show the girls the Journey descriptions for their age level, choose your adventure topic, a time frame that works for your troop, and get your girls’ Journey started!

6 Ways to Inspire Your Girls to Love the Planet

Here at Girl Scouts, unlike Kermit the Frog, we believe it’s easy being green! Caring about the outdoors was passed down by our nature loving founder Juliette Gordon Low and her legacy of being responsible stewards of our world still resonates with our alumnae and members today. You might even say being green is part of our DNA! So how do we inspire a lasting love and respect for the planet we all call home in our current generation of girls? Here are a few of our favorite ways!

1. Go on a It’s Your Planet-Love It! Journey. This fun series is packed with activities that guide girls as they learn about environmental issues such as clean water and air, noise pollution, global change, soil contamination, and agriculture. It ends with a Take Action project that encourages girls to make a difference in their community for the planet. What a great way to explore with girls the “use resources wisely” part of the Girl Scout Law! 
2. Become Girl Scout Rangers at a National Park. In this fun program with the National Park Service girls are invited to explore the outdoors and learn about the history of the national parks as they participate in organized educational activities or volunteer service projects for a minimum of 10 hours at one or more national parks. Check out the requirements and start your adventure with our national parks today!
3. Earn a naturalist legacy badge. Each age-level from Brownie through Ambassador can explore a different part of the natural world, from bugs to sky, with these fun and nature themed badges. Find out more about the naturalist badge for your age-level on our badge explorer. 
4. Complete your Community Service Bar with your Girl Scout. Cadettes and up can earn this award (part of the National Leadership Awards) by making a difference in their community and practicing the values of the Girl Scout Law. Girls should get involved with a cause they care about by choosing an organization to volunteer with and complete at least 20 hours of service with that organization.What a great way to help the planet!
5. Test your girls’ mettle with our outdoor badges or activities. With so many wonderful outdoor experiences and badges to choose, from hiking to canoeing, you’re sure to find something that will inspire a lifelong love of the outdoors in your girls.
6. Let your girls take the lead on an environment focused Take Action project. They could petition to build monarch butterfly way stations at their school or lead a community water conservation awareness campaign. It’s all up to them as they explore the community, identify an issue, and put together a plan that has long term benefits and sustainable community support. Each Journey series ends in a Take Action project and Highest Awards in Girl Scouts also follow those requirements. 

Are you ready to inspire the next generation to love the planet? We hope so and with these six ideas and some girl power we know that our girls will grow up in a greener world as they use their resources wisely!

6 Reasons to Love the Volunteer Toolkit

Girls have more fun when they can shape their own experience, do hands-on activities, and work together as teams. Girl Scout volunteers have more fun when they have easy access to resources that help them spend less time planning/coordinating and more time with their girls trying new things, making friends, and exploring the world of opportunities available to Girl Scouts!

Our Volunteer Toolkit (more information here) launched last spring by GSUSA is one of those critical resources. It allows girls and leaders to explore meeting topics and program activities together, and follow the fun as they plan their Girl Scout year. A digital planning tool, it gives volunteers (and girls) resources and program content to get the year started—and keep it going smoothly! But it can do so much more than that and we love its versatility. Here are some of our favorite reasons to love this new resource:

1. It’s Everywhere– as a digital resource volunteers can plan and prepare practically anywhere their smartphone, tablet, laptop, or computer are! Stuck in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and need to email the troop a quick reminder not to forget their rain boots for Saturday’s creek stomping trip? Pull out your smart phone, click on the My Troop tab, and send out your reminder.
2. It’s Evolving: GSUSA is updating content, adding functions, and improving this tool based on feedback from the councils and volunteers using this resource.  The My Troop tab went live this fall, a parent view was added in October, and new badge content was added for Brownies (Computer Expert, Brownie Sense, Outdoor Adventurer) and Juniors (Entertainment Technology, Social Butterfly, Horseback Riding). As the years go by, more content will be added and features will be upgraded/altered based on input from volunteers across the nation.
3. It’s Customizable: K-5 troop leaders can choose from pre-populated (out-of-the-box) year plans from the Year Plan Library or create your own customized plan by dragging and dropping meetings into your customized Year Plan track. All leaders (K-12) can use the “Create Your Own” Year Plan to add custom activities, trips, and council activities/events to their Year Plan.
4. It Tracks Important Things: Through the  My Troop and Meeting Plan tabs you can keep track of who’s registered in your troop, their meeting attendance and achievements like badges/Journey awards earned, and their guardian’s contact information. Then when the Finance tab goes live, you can track troop income and expenses. You’ll even be able to use it to electronically submit your finance report. All of these things, in one digital resource!
5. It Keeps Parents Informed- Primary caregivers have the ability to view their girls’ troop year. Features include: read only views of My Troop Tab (no contact info), Year Plan, Meeting Plan, and Financial Tab. For tech savvy parents that means less need to call troop leaders to ask what’s on the packing list for the annual camp out, when the next meeting is, or what the troop spent their money on this year. It’s like a digital Girl Scout parent planner/calendar that instantly updates when changes are made. 
6. It’s Green: This resource will replace the Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting and the Journeys as the primary resource for Girl Scout volunteers for badge and Journey requirements. While girls can still enjoy having their own Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting and the Journey girl books, volunteers will be able to find the content in those resources through this digital resource. Less books to buy, store, and lug around with your troop materials! Let the trees rejoice!

So now that you know our favorite things about the Volunteer Toolkit, what are you waiting for? Try it out yourself and join the digital Girl Scout age!

Highest Awards: What To Do

Last week we listed 14 things Not To Do for a Girl Scouts Highest Award. Now it’s time to list what TO DO for your Highest Award.

• Complete the Pre-requisites: girls must be registered members, the appropriate age level for each award (check here), and must have completed a Journey at that age level before they can begin planning their Highest Award project. Girls earning their Gold Award who have not previously earned their Silver Award must complete 2 Senior or Ambassador Journeys before beginning the Gold Award process.
• Learn from an Expert: we highly recommend girls attend one of our Highest Awards 101 workshops or webinars, or the Silver and Gold specific workshops (check Ebiz for upcoming dates) OR contact the Highest Awards support staff in your region. It is especially important for the Gold Award that the girl does the contacting about her specific Gold Award Project! Your staff support contacts are:
  • Cincinnati- Devon Beck (devonbeck@gswo.org)
  • Dayton- Sarah Kelly (sarahkelly@gswo.org)
  • Lima – Megan Ramey (meganramey@gswo.org)
  • Toledo – Rebecca Sarantou (rebeccasarantou@gswo.org)
• Explore Your Community: every community is unique and has different assets and organizations that effect the needs of the community. While community A may have access to awesome  STEM programs for children because of a local university’s outreach department, community B may have no STEM programs available for children that don’t require driving to community A. What is a need for one community may be a strength for another and vice versa. Good places to start checking into the needs of your local community are the local newspaper and news channels. You can also interview long time residents of the community about the needs and assets they see in your area. Use Community Mapping too.
• Identify Issues You Care About: you’ll be spending a large amount of time on your project, so consider what things you value and skills you have that you enjoy sharing. What sparks your interest? Whether it’s music, science, or animals find a community need that relates to that topic so that your project centers around something you’re passionate about and enjoy.
• Investigate the Root Cause of the Issue: when you hear about a problem or an issue, always ask “why” this is an issue so that you can trace it back to the root cause of the problem. Need an example? How about you discover your town has a low employment rate. Now find out why. Are there not enough jobs for the amount of workers available? Do the workers available not have the right skill level for the open positions? Maybe a lack of transportation in the community means the unemployed cannot get to the open positions? Although multiple communities may have the same issue, the root cause of the issue may be very different. When investigating:
  • Demonstrate courage as you investigate your issue, knowing that what you learn may challenge your own and others beliefs about your community.
  • Use a variety of sources- interview people, read books and articles, find professional organizations online.
  • Remember to evaluate each source for reliability and accuracy. Bob’sAngryRant.com is not as reliable a source as a reputable news-site or organization in your community.
  • Make a global connection-think about others who may have worked on the same problem in the past, or check the internet to see how others around the globe deal with your issue. What can you learn from their approach? For example, if your local park has noticed a sharp decrease in their bee populations find out what other parks/towns/places have done to help with this issue. Research why being a world without bees is a bad thing and how it affects other issues (for the curious here’s why).

• Find a Mentor: seek out a project advisor who has expertise in the topic of your project either through their own job, volunteer opportunities or general knowledge of the topic. *Note: your parent/guardian or troop leader cannot be your project advisor.
• Build Your Team: seek out people with valuable skills who are also passionate about your issue. Remember to respect different points of view and ways of working and that they are your volunteers so this is a choice for them, not an obligation. Work with their schedules and be prepared to be flexible in your timeline to accommodate their schedules.
• Develop Your Project: identify a main goal for your project that everyone involved can understand and seek a way to meet that goal. The basic thing each girl should be able to say is “through our efforts we achieved X, and because of X, we lessened/made a positive impact on issue Y in our community“. A simple example is “through our creation of a bee friendly garden at the local park and our bee advocate junior gardening workshops we created a place for bees to thrive and educated community members on the importance of bees and because of this the bee population will grow in our community”.
• Make a Plan that Lasts: being organized and thinking through a probable timeline are essential to a quality project. Consider the impact too: is it short term or are there aspects that will have an effect beyond your initial involvent? As a leadership Take Action project the goal is to make a lasting impact on a community need, so the project needs long-term benefits and community support. This is the difference between Service and Take Action. Service projects are done FOR the community with a short impact, while Take Action  projects are done WITH the community so that the impact is sustained. Still not clear? Click the link above for a more in-depth look at the difference between service and Take Action.
• Gold Award Only- Get Approval: while the Highest Awards support staff welcome questions about projects from all levels, the Gold Award has an added requirement in its approval process. Girls must submit a Gold Award Proposal with a detailed project plan attached to council. Once received, members of the Gold Award Committee will contact the girl with project feedback and dates of upcoming committee meetings so that each girl can present her project plan to the committee in her region for approval before officially starting the project.
• Put the Plan in Motion: you’ve made a plan, found your team, plotted out a timeline and (for Gold Award) gotten the approval needed. All that’s left is taking action to make your world a better place! Don’t be discouraged if something does not happen exactly as you thought it would or if there are unforeseen obstacles that you must overcome. This is all part of being a leader and making an impact. So keep brainstorming your way around obstacles, consult your team, troubleshoot issues with your advisor as they occur, and reach your goal!
• Share Your Story: demonstrating to an audience what you have learned sets the stage for even broader impact, and is sometimes the best way for you to recognize what you have accomplished and see how much you have grown. It will also help you get others inspired to act! Need ideas? Here are a few ways to share your story, for more check the award guidelines in the Highest Awards section of our website:
  • Create a website or blog about what you have learned and how your project will help your community.
  • At a workshop for community members, present what you have learned and what your project will do for the community. Or do a presentation for a group of younger Girl Scouts—you will definitely inspire them!
  • Write an essay or an article for your local or school newspaper

• Reflect: congratulations on completing a project that makes a difference! Take some time to think about all that you have accomplished. Who did you meet that you didn’t know? What did you learn from others about your project issue, about your community, and about yourself? What would you do differently if you did it again? This is Step 4 of the Take Action process.
• Make it Official: all awards must turn in a final report and evaluation (in the Highest Awards section of our website) to be official. Each award requires a slightly different final report (Bronze is a checklist, Silver is a Final Report with attached questions, and Gold is a Final Report and Presentation before the Gold Award Committee) and approval process. The Bronze Award is leader approved and the pin can be purchased in our shop when the checklist and evaluations are turned in. The Silver Award is leader approved but council must confirm after they receive an individual final report from each girl and purchasing pins in the shop requires the approval letter from council. The Gold Award is approved by the Gold Award Committee after the Final Report and a presentation before the committee and pins are purchased for the girls to be given out at the annual council-wide Gold Award Ceremony in March.
• Celebrate: you’ve accomplished so much, it’s time for a celebration. Invite friends and family to an end of the year party and recognize the girls in your troop who earned this award. Does your service unit have a picnic/banquet/end of year event? If so, take a moment to recognize all of the girls in your community who have earned these awards. It doesn’t have to be big and splashy to be meaningful!

Now that you’ve got a handle on what to do for your Highest Award, go out and start investigating how you can make a change in your community. Dream big, you’ve got a lot of power inside of you and a whole team of people cheering you on as you make your world a better place!

Your Newest Time Saver-The Volunteer Toolkit

GSUSA and Western Ohio have launched The Girl Scout Volunteer Toolkit (VTK) which is a comprehensive digital tool accessible on your computer, smartphone and/or tablet that is the primary support resource for troop leaders who work with K–5th grade troops. For those volunteers, this resource will replace the adult leaders guide for Journeys and the Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting. What does that mean in people talk? It means that we have a new resource with a trans-formative purpose: to save our volunteers precious time and frustration so you can spend less time navigating our many available resources as you plan, organize, and manage your troop year with the girls and more time doing the things that you imagined when you volunteered: changing girls’ lives through amazing experiences!

Here are a few frequently asked questions about the toolkit and our answers:

What will I find in the Volunteer Toolkit (VTK)? You will find the five tabs below to help make managing your troop more simple.

• My Troop: This tab allows you to manage your troop contacts, renew membership, and communicate with parents. This feature will be live by fall 2015.
• Year Plan: This tab allows you to broadly manage your troop year based on what girls want to do. When you log into VTK for the first time, you will see three year plan options for your girls to choose from including one Girl Scout Badge year and two Girl Scout Journey year plans based on the It’s Your Story−Tell It Journey and the It’s Your Planet−Love It Journey. The first two meetings of each of these year plans will help you decide, in partnership with the girls, which of the three year plans they would like to use based on their interests.
• Meeting Plan: This tab will also allow you to set your meeting calendar including meeting locations, date and time. In this tab, you will view meeting details including activity descriptions, meeting aids, materials lists, and more.
• Resources: Here you can also customize activities, delete activities that your girls wouldn’t enjoy and replace them with new activities. You can easily create your own activity or replace it with an activity from within the toolkit. Here you can find additional resources to support the activities that your girls choose to do. Here you will find the Safety Activity Checkpoints, all meeting aids, and other helpful resources. You can easily add the meeting aids to a specific meeting in your year plan.
• Finances: The finances tab will allow you to submit your troop financial report to the council and share it with parents. You will still have to submit your troop bank statement to the council if you do not bank at one of the preferred banks. (PNC or 5/3 Bank). This feature will be live by fall 2015.

How do I access the Volunteer Toolkit? Starting May 1, 2015, when you visit our website, you will see a My GS tab. You will enter your login credentials there to gain access to the Volunteer Toolkit. The VTK integrates right into the council website to allow the leader to seamlessly go back and forth between the website and the VTK.

Will there be training on how to use the Volunteer Toolkit? The toolkit is designed to be intuitive and require no formal training, however, video tutorials will continue to be made available via a YouTube link that will live on the GSUSA National YouTube page. Check out the Volunteer Toolkit Tutorial playlist below.

Will all troop leadership have access to the toolkit? Direct primary volunteers for K–5 troops will have access to the toolkit (Leader and Co-Leader). In future releases, the VTK will grow its user audiences to other Secondary Primary troop volunteer roles such as Troop Cookie volunteers. Parents will also be able to view some information in the Volunteer Toolkit in future releases.

Why is the Toolkit only for K-5 troops (updated with new information 8/4/5)? Going digital is a new direction for our national organization. In order to use our resources wisely, we had to narrow our focus as a starting point. That doesn’t mean that we care more about younger girls than older girls. Older girls are very important to us! In early September, older girl direct primary volunteers will have access to the My Troop, Resources, and Finances tabs. They will not have Journey, Girls Guide, or year plan content available, but they will get to “Create Your Own” year plan. We look forward to offering additional updates as soon as they are available.

What if I don’t have internet access at my meeting place? How will I access program materials? You can easily download the materials to your device or print them to take to your meeting. Also, the VTK can be accessed on a tablet or smart phone, which may expand where it can be used.

What about volunteers who don’t have internet access at home? The toolkit is not an app so that means that it can be accessed from any computer or device. Libraries are a great resource for volunteers who don’t have access to the internet at home. They can print meeting plans or download them to their personal computer or drive.

Why has Girl Scouting decided to go digital? We have heard about all of the hours that Girl Scout volunteers spend supporting troops. VTK is designed to help cut down the amount of time it takes for a volunteer to manage their troop including planning meetings (in partnership with the girls), communicating with parents, and finding support resources. The VTK puts all of this at their fingertips by having a central location for all of their Girl Scout “stuff.” Now volunteers can easily find resources, access the website, and communicate with parents all in one spot.

So are you as excited as we are to start using this new resource? Let’s make the 2015-2016 troop year a year for you to take back some time, finish a long standing project, spend an afternoon blowing bubbles with that special girl in your life. Thanks to the Toolkit you can finally do that thing you always wanted to do if you just had a few more free hours in your week!

One More Reason to Eat Well this Holiday Season

Learning to cook is a fairly traditional Girl Scout activity, which is why the Cook Legacy Badges take girls from Snacks (Brownie) all the way through their first Dinner Party (Ambassador). Some might even call cooking from scratch, in a society with supermarket aisles full of pre-packaged meals, a lost skill. So what’s the benefit of cooking with your girls? There are quite a few!

Some of the benefits:

• It encourages girls to try healthy foods.
• Girls feel like they are accomplishing something.
• Learning to cook is a skill girls can use for the rest of their lives.
• Girls who learn to eat well may be more likely to eat healthfully as adults.
• Positive cooking experiences can help build self-confidence.
• Research shows that kids who cook with their parents may even be less likely to abuse drugs.

Want to check our sources? Check out this article on Web MD Why it’s so important to spend time in the kitchen with your children — and how you can get started for more information. Still need more convincing? Cooking also improves children’s creative thinking skills as they alter recipes and explore chemical reactions (What’s the Chemistry of Cooking?), it reinforces  important math concepts (Learning Math Through Cooking) in a hands-on way, and can be really fun. Plus you get to eat your creation at the end. And who wouldn’t love a science experiment that ends with food? Total win/win.

 

If you’re ready to pick up your spatula and start cooking with your girls, we’ve got some great recipe ideas for you. From breakfast all the way through dessert, there’s a recipe for every time of day and for every age level in The Girl Scout Recipe Collection. Most of the recipes are taken directly from either the Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting or from the Journeys so girls can connect their cooking directly to other program resources. We even have cooking-related program events coming up such as Know-Bake Brownies (Toledo), Cultural Cooking (Dayton), or Daisy Chef (Lima) to name just a few available on Ebiz. Now that you know the benefits, what are you waiting for? Make a difference and cook with some kids today!

 

Imagine a World Where No One Is Worried About the Way They Look!

Can you imagine a world where girls grow up with the confidence to be themselves? We can!  Help us start a World Wide Beauty Revolution! This is the vision that drove Girl Scouts of Western Ohio and nine other Girl Scout councils to partner with Dove and Girl Scouts of the USA to launch Free Being Me, a leadership initiative focused on helping girls ages 7-14 better understand global definitions of beauty, define beauty for themselves and boost their self-confidence in the process.

Free Being Me has been co-created by GSUSA and the Dove Self Esteem Project for Girl Scouts and is designed to improve girls’ body confidence in a fun and interactive way. The activities have been informed by world-leading research in body confidence and are a direct extension of the It’s Your Story-Tell It! Journey. Troops can choose to participate in Free Being Me activities on their own or as a part of completing the Journey.  All girls who participate can receive the Free Being Me patch – at no cost, just by completing the online program evaluation and turning in the troop participation form to their regional office. The evaluation form, full curriculum packets, and more information can be found on our website under Free Being Me.

After our council launched the program last winter we recognized that the large curriculum packets, while full of wonderful activities and ideas for inspiring body confidence in girls, were cumbersome to print and wade through for our troop leaders. To help with that we created two shortened activity packets (only 6-8 pages), one for 7-10 year olds and one for 11-14 year olds, that fulfill the patch requirements. Already completed the patch activities? Share your story with the world in the Free Being Me Stories Archive.

So what are you waiting for? Start a beauty revolution with your troop today! 

 

The End of Bullying Begins with Me!

Any woman who can remember the exact words someone said years ago that made her feel small and weak knows the old adage “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is wrong. Words can hurt forever and “relational aggression” or hurting one another emotionally rather than physically through things like manipulation, exclusion, taunting, gossiping, cliques, cyber bullying, and toxic friendships can spread deep roots that influence our behavior decades later.

October is National Bullying Prevention month and Girl Scouts across the country are raising awareness of this issue and empowering girls to recognize when bullying occurs and to stand up for themselves and others. It doesn’t have to be like this!

So how do we help our girls navigate this maze of relationships and bully behaviors? How do we build a generation of girls who are willing to take a stand? The first step to stopping these behaviors is knowledge. Have your girls take these online quizzes: Test Your Bullying IQ and Test Your Relational Aggression IQ and then discuss with them their answers, reactions to the statistics, and what they think will make a difference in their school. Challenge them to be open, honest, and supportive with one another during the discussion.

Then seek out resources to help give girls (and parents) the tools that they need to take that stand. The Cadette Journey aMAZE: The Twists and Turns of Getting Along is a great resource for helping girls navigate friendships, social circles, and other bullying behaviors they may encounter. It has tips, tools, and resources for both girls and adults to help them become strong advocates for themselves and others. GSUSA has also created an additional resource for aMAZE called BFF: Be a Friend First that has been used very successfully in schools across our council and the nation. Check out these videos below to see what girls and school administrators are saying about BFF and its impact in their community.

For more information contact your regional Girl Scout office or attend our upcoming aMAZE! Journey Retreat November 7-9th, 2014 (see Ebiz for more details). Also PBS Parents has a great list of recommendations for Helping Middle Schoolers Navigate their Social Lives that can also be modified for younger girls because while these bullying behaviors are more prevalent in middle school, the beginnings of the “mean girl” behaviors can be seen in younger girls. Let’s help our girls be the generation that stands up to bullying!

Stepping Up Your Take Action Project with Community Mapping!

There are 5 important steps in any Take Action project. Not sure what they are? They’re actually the Five Stages of Service Learning: inventory and investigation, preparation and planning, action, reflection and demonstration! Like every great journey (and project), that first step is frequently the hardest part. After all, there are so many needs in the community that narrowing it down to one community issue can be daunting. So how do you start investigating? Try making a community map with your troop.

What’s a community map? A community map is a drawing or a list that shows the community’s needs and resources, including contacts that might help the girls when working on a Take Action project. Here’s how to make one: have girls draw a picture of their community. Include resources such as the library, animal shelters, parks department, and more. Don’t forget to include parents, friends, and the girls themselves under resources. If your group is having a hard time visualizing their community take a walk around your neighborhood to get ideas.

Next have the girls think about issues or problems in their community. You can have girls ask their parents, check the local newspaper, and watch the news for ideas and bring them to the next meeting.The problems girls find may be small or large. Some examples may include: an old unsafe playground at the local park, many stray cats that don’t have a home, nothing for teens to do on the weekend, bullies at school, etc.

Use the map to choose a project issue based on the girls’ interests and abilities. Research the issue using a variety of sources like interviewing people, reading books and articles, finding professional and community organizations online and in the community involved in this issue. Create an in-depth profile of the issue, underlying factors that contribute to it, and how the organizations/individuals in the community are currently working to impact the problem. You can even create a community asset map just for that issue. Check out this example of a map created by the Early Childhood Research & Practice Journal showing possible assets to address early literacy and school readiness:

Feeling ready for step 2? Tune in next week for tips on the next step: preparation and planning.

 

Is this Service or Take Action: The Basic 411.

Is our project a Take Action project or a service project? What’s the difference? These questions come up frequently from both volunteers and girls who are delving into the Journeys and highest awards and exploring how they can make a difference in their community. Service has a very simple definition “a helpful act” [Merriam-Webster’s dictionary]. Community service projects are frequently organized for the community to help them with a specific and short-term need.  Coordinating a food drive for the local food pantry is a great example of a community service project. It addresses the very specific need that food pantry has for goods and it’s impact is short term as the shelves will likely be empty again in a few weeks and another food drive will be needed to refill them.  This project in partnership with the food pantry would be a great way for CSA girls to earn their Community Service Bars but it’s not a Take Action project.

A Take Action project picks up where that short-term fix of the service project leaves off with these three essential elements; it identifies the root cause of that community need, it has long term benefits, and sustainable community support. Check out this Take Action Workshop outline created by Girl Scouts Heart of the South for a really in-depth look at the definition of Take Action and how to move from a service project to a Take Action project. Remember the most essential difference is that Take Action projects do something WITH the community to meet a need while service projects do something FOR a community.  So for our example community need from above (hungry people) a solution could be to approach community organizations about establishing a community garden for the food pantry and creating a “simple tips to growing your own food” pamphlet with seeds to distribute to food pantry customers to enable them to grow their own food in the future. This project directly involves those who will benefit from it in meeting the need, has a long term-plan, and the community organization sponsoring it will ensure that it continues past when the Girl Scouts who began it have moved on. So does the difference between Service and Take Action make sense now? We hope so. Now that you understand the basics, stay tuned for our next blog entry where we delve deeper into the essential steps (hint: there are 5) to an effective Take Action project. So what will your next Take Action project be?