My First Guest Post! How Girl Scout Troop 3763 Earned The Bronze Award

Hello fellow Girl Scout leaders!

A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a Girl Scout troop leader in California.  Her girls had one more step to earning the Bronze Award…they needed to share what they did.  I happily told the leader that she could share it how her girls achieved the award here!

While these girls are Cadettes now, their leader explained this to me in her email that they began as Daisies in the middle of kindergarten, so the fall is really a “catch-up” season.  Although they had already bridged from Juniors to Cadettes the previous spring, they had to complete this activity for the  Bronze Award in order to officially move on to Cadette activities.

We began our Bronze Award journey by choosing our troop of eight girls as our team (though there are many options for choosing a project team, including joining with other troops, or even with friends). As a team, we worked through the Junior Journey, It’s Your World—Change It! This journey workbook guided us through community discovery, helped us plan our Bronze Award project, and earned us a tri-circle leadership award patch.

With our eyes opened wide from the journey book, we were assigned to search our community and share our thoughts. We came up with many ideas, but decided by vote to perform a Variety Show at a senior living center. We felt this would be a great way to directly affect our community: “We focused on the seniors in our community who might be lonely, because of this time of year,” said one Girl Scout.

1. Coordinating the project with the senior living center.

2. Creating the Variety Show.

We chose a nearby senior living center and contacted the Director. Our Leader introduced our troop and our plan and purpose, explaining that we were earning a Bronze Award, building leadership skills and a sense of community. Our Leader then scheduled a meeting between the Director and our troop. Before the meeting, we discussed the goals of the meeting. We considered questions to ask to determine the seniors’ needs and interests, and we thought about how we could meet those needs. We also discussed sensitivities regarding the elderly, considering how they are different and how they are the same.

During our meeting with the Director at the senior living center our Leader acted as facilitator, letting us do most of the talking. During this meeting we were introduced to the environment of a senior home, and we gained a sense of the senior community. We set an appointment for the event, examined the stage space, and inquired about equipment like microphones, chairs, and a piano.

With date, time, and needs coordinated with the senior living center, we were ready for the second step, to create and perform our Variety Show. We will share this phase of our journey in Part II of this post series, How We Earned Our Bronze Award.