By middle school, most Girl Scouts tend to drop out in order to focus more on other activities. For most girls, being a Girl Scout meant going to camp every summer and selling cookies once a year. However, for the few who stayed with the program through middle school and into high school, Girl Scouts takes on a whole new meaning and becomes more than just singing “Make New Friends” around the campfire and eating Thin Mints.
“So many people I know quit after middle school, but I think it’s so important to keep going,” junior Rachel Rogers said. “As a child you learn about Girl Scout values, but once you get older, it actually starts to make sense. It sounds cliché but Girl Scouts really is all about helping the community and trying to make the world a better place.”
From a Daisy to a Brownie to an Ambassador, a Girl Scout is taught the importance of being a responsible and thoughtful citizen. It starts in the Daisy stage with the entire troop sitting around a table and reading from an activity handbook and blossoms into the Gold Award, a huge humanitarian project that the girl must tackle alone.
“I’m currently working on my Gold Award, which is the highest award you can get as a Girl Scout,” junior Debbie Chang said. “Through it, a girl becomes engaged in the community and works on her leadership and teamwork.”
The Gold Award requires 80 hours of planning and implementing a large-scale project that is innovative, engages others and has a lasting impact on the community with an emphasis on sustainability. However, this is more than just an ordinary service project. It encompasses organizational, leadership and networking skills. By herself, the girl must think of and plan an idea, get approval from all organizations it concerns, estimate and raise the funds needed to execute the project, pull off the project and finally, make sure it stays prominent and self-sustainable for years to come.
“The Gold Award gives you the opportunity to show that you are capable of doing more than people expect of you,” Rogers said. “There’s so much to do. At first I was like ‘Nah, it’ll be fine,’ but you have to organize everything and raise so much money. In total, the Gold Award has taken me almost an entire year.”
Although the Gold Award is the most prominent thing that girls come away from Girl Scouts having accomplished, in a larger sense, it is the little things that count.
“I think it’s most important as a Girl Scout to help and inform others, especially younger kids, because they are the future so it’s important that they learn early on what it entails to be a good citizen,” Rogers said.
From the beginning, Girl Scouts are taught to be honest, courageous, compassionate and confident through activities including camping, community service and learning practical skills such as first aid. By high school, a Girl Scout has had those values embedded into her brain and is ready to face the world as an empowered and capable person.
“In my 11 years as a Girl Scout, I’ve learned that there’s always something else to do,” Chang said. “It’s is an ongoing commitment and it gets hard sometimes, but you come out the other end a different person who is not only concerned about global issues but is also interested in how to solve them.”
