A local troop of Girl Scouts is being honored this spring for three years of community service and projects that bring small, but lasting benefits to their communities.
The Girl Scout Silver …
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A local troop of Girl Scouts is being honored this spring for three years of community service and projects that bring small, but lasting benefits to their communities.
The Girl Scout Silver Award will be granted to eight local Scouts at a ceremony in June, said Troop 2067 co-leader Shalene Blackwood. The awards are a mid-level recognition that shows the Scouts are becoming more capable of independent projects that benefit their communities.
“Most of the Silver Award projects are self-sustaining, something that goes on after they’ve moved on, and doesn’t need their maintenance,” Blackwood added.
To earn their awards, eight Girl Scouts in the troop split into pairs to accomplish four projects during their middle school years in the Warrenton and Truesdale area. Along the way, several of them picked up skills for carpentry and assembly, and all of them participated in fundraising for supplies and materials.
Ryan Bartlett and Aime York erected a new shed at the small community garden on Conrad Circle in Truesdale. Actually, they erected two — the first was destroyed in a wind storm.
“We were thinking, if they have a better shed, they can hold more stuff, and maybe make the garden look nicer and have more people come to it, because not a whole lot of people come to the garden,” Ryan said. Together with Aime, they purchased used sheds for the garden and assembled them on their own.
“It would be nice to see more community members here ... to see the community come together and maintain the garden,” added Aime, who lives nearby.
Olivia Nave and Ashlynn Reeves, meanwhile, planned, built and installed a “gaga ball” pit at Holy Rosary School in Warrenton. Gaga ball is a recently popular game, played inside a wooden octagon with a compacted ground surface.
Buying the lumber and supplies for the pit cost a lot of Girl Scout money, Olivia said, and building it was a lot like building a fence.
“Most of it we had to learn before we could do it,” Ashlynn said. “It was tough digging the holes and getting it all parallel and level.”
Olivia commented that all the Girl Scout projects are meant to be close to home and connect with the community. “Instead of just living there, actually doing stuff to help out the community. It teaches us how important it is to take care of (the community),” she said.
Scouts Rose Renshaw and Morgan Quinn decided their project would be a “little library,” a box full of free books available outside of Truesdale City Hall. The box is made so anyone can take or leave books at any time, and positioned so families in nearby neighborhoods have access to books that they can walk to get.
“We wanted to make it so it’s accessible to other kids,” said Rose. “There’s a neighborhood right there, but the library is all the way across town.”
Since installing the library in December, they’ve noticed that teen and adult books have been more popular, Morgan noted. She added that the project seemed like a good fit because their mothers owned a lot of books and worked at book-related services.
Claire Blackwood and Kaiya Cecil also picked a project for a high-traffic public area. They installed pet waste stations in Truesdale’s new Bruer Park to help make it convenient for people to clean up after their dogs.
“We had to find a problem in our community to solve,” said Kaiya. “So we put up pet waste boxes in our new park getting built to help keep our community clean.”
The girls got the lumber and refillable canisters for plastic bags; cut, stained and assembled everything; and then coordinated with the city government to install proper signs, Clair explained. She said it’s an example of how little projects can make a long-term positive impact.
“It teaches us to help the community any way you can,” she said.
Jessica Nave, the troop’s other co-leader, said the next objective for the Girl Scouts as they go through high school is to earn their Gold Awards (the equivalent of an Eagle Scout recognition in Boy Scouts). To earn gold, the Scouts will have to plan and execute a community project completely independently, along with even more community service. It’s a tough step up from working with partners, but the troop leaders are confident their girls can accomplish it.
