I spend a considerable amount of my time leading three Girl Scout troops. One of the biggest things the programme gives girls is the opportunity to lead, in ways other organisations simply don’t. It pushes them out of their comfort zones and gets them trying things they’d otherwise avoid.
I take that part seriously.
This year, eight girls in my Cadette troop earned their Girl Scout Silver Award — the highest award available at the Cadette level, and second only to the Gold Award, which can be earned at Senior and Ambassador levels. The Silver requires completing a Journey first, which typically takes three to six months, and then a project of at least fifty hours.
What they actually built
Each girl designed her own community service project, with one hard requirement: it had to keep working after she stopped being involved.
My daughter built a platform at a tiger rescue for a bobcat named Maggie. Two girls made dresses for girls in Africa, and taught other girls to sew in the process while explaining why the need existed. One built a set of activities for a therapeutic riding programme. Another organised donations for a local animal rescue and set up semi-permanent collection bins that would be maintained after her project ended.
Each project was as distinct as the girl who designed it.
The requirement that does the work
That sustainability condition is the whole thing, and it’s worth pulling out, because it’s the difference between a service project and a piece of actual leadership.
Anyone can do something good once. Collect the donations, run the event, paint the fence. It feels excellent, it photographs well, and three months later there is no trace of it.
Making it survive your departure is a completely different problem. It forces a fourteen-year-old to think about who maintains this, what happens when I leave, does the organisation actually want it, and will anyone still be doing this next year. Those are the questions that separate a gesture from an institution.
Most adults running businesses never learn to ask them.
What the award structure teaches, almost accidentally
Three things, and all of them transfer directly.
Break it into pieces small enough to start. Fifty hours is intimidating stated as fifty hours. It is entirely manageable as a series of afternoons. We deliberately chunk the projects so the girls learn that large things are achievable if you take them a bit at a time — which is the single most useful working habit anyone can acquire, and it doesn’t come naturally to anybody.
You have to write it up. The report is part of the award, and the girls resent it. It is also where the learning gets consolidated, because explaining what you did and why forces you to notice what actually happened. Businesses skip this constantly. The project ends, everyone moves on, and nothing is learned because nobody wrote down what worked.
The prerequisite structure means you can’t skip ahead. Journey first, then Silver, then Gold. Each stage assumes the last. It’s slower than ambitious teenagers would like, and it means that by the time someone attempts the Gold Award, they’ve already done the smaller version twice.
Why it matters that they practise early
Giving girls the chance to lead at twelve or fourteen means they arrive at adulthood having already done it.
Not theoretically. They have run a project, managed a budget, persuaded adults to help, had something go wrong, and finished it anyway. When someone offers them a leadership role at twenty-five, they aren’t deciding whether they’re the kind of person who does that. They already know they are, because they have the evidence.
That’s what I think the programme is really for. Not the badges. The evidence.
It’s a genuine responsibility and one I thoroughly enjoy. And I’d hope some of them go on to the Gold Award in high school — a rather more demanding award than most people realise.
