Life Skills

Activity Details

Time needed: 45–60 min

Materials needed:

• Pens, pencils, or markers
• Poster board or large pieces of paper

Setup

The Girl Scout Silver Award is the highest award a Cadette can earn. To earn it, you and your team will identify a community issue you care about and research it to understand the cause and then come up with a solution and work with your community to make a plan that brings the solution to life and lasts beyond your involvement.

For example, you might live near an ocean and notice there’s a lot of trash on the beach. You connect with local ocean-based organizations to learn about what they’ve noticed and why. With your team, you decide that a major cause of the issue is a lack of trash and recycling cans. So your team goes to your city council and advocates for more trash cans on the beach. The city supports putting up more trash cans along the beach, and you get support from rangers to empty and maintain the cans. To celebrate, you host an ocean cleanup day for your community, where people collect trash and pledge to always use trashcans.

Before you start, be sure to complete a Cadette Journey and its associated Take Action project (step 1). You can also start an issue chart (step 2) that will help direct your community map.

Activity:

For this activity, you’ll make a map that helps you identify issues in your community and resources that might help. Here’s how:

1. Decide which community you want to map; you might choose your neighborhood, your school, a sports group, a house of worship, Girl Scouts, an imaginary community, or another option completely!
   
   
2. Use your memory or imagination to envision how that community looks. Get into it—describe the features and characteristics of your community, including the buildings, streets, landmarks, businesses, libraries, schools, and parks. Make a note next to each location that describes which needs, issues, or problems may exist there. You might even star the needs you’re most interested in.
   
   
3. Next make a list of the resources you found while creating your community map. These might help you better understand the community need you identified or help you address it. Here are some examples:
   

• City hall is where you can contact the mayor and other elected officials.
• A homeless shelter is where you can talk to the shelter’s director about programs that it can develop to help the homeless in the community.
• A local owner of a salvage yard can develop effective ways to deal with trash that’s hard to recycle (such as refrigerators, televisions, computers, and cell phones)..

4. Separate your resources into different categories by asking: 

• Who has knowledge and background of the causes for various community issues?
• Who may be good at helping think through solutions?
• Who can access additional resources?

Make a contact list of who to discuss further research issues with that you’re interested in. Then as an individual or small group from your troop, choose a project based on what matters most to you or where you think you can realistically create some positive change?

Girl Scouts at Home activities have been adapted from existing Girl Scout programming and optimized for use at home during a period of social distancing.

Adapted from Step 4 of the Silver Award guidelines. Download the guidelines and connect with your local council to learn any additional requirements and support it offers.