This is a Gold Award Project?

The Baltimore Sun reports that Alyssa Judson and Molly Wheltle, members of Troop 3122 for about a dozen years each who will age out of the Girl Scouts at the end of the school year, earned their Girl Scout Gold Award for completing separate service projects in the fall that aided underprivileged Baltimore City residents.

For her project, Alyssa Judson made a series of presentations to youth in Baltimore City and Baltimore County about homelessness in the city.

Additionally, she collected a dozen blankets and sleeping bags at St. Mark School and worked with Scouts in Troop 984 at Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church to make six 6- by 6-foot quilts and seven fleece blankets. The blankets and sleeping bags were later donated to Southwest Emergency Services in Arbutus.

Using media both old and new, Wheltle helped make First Communion extra special for 85 girls at the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Highlandtown.

The senior at Mount de Sales Academy advertised her collection drive of First Communion dresses in five parish bulletins, on a Facebook page and website and through word of mouth. By the end of the project, she had far exceeded her goal. "I was really excited we got 85 dresses. I expected 20," Wheltle said.

(from the GSUSA blog)

Truly, I hope that these collection projects were not ALL the girls did!  But if we believe the Baltimore Sun....

Alyssa's project sounds more robust, and I'm hoping that she started with the issue of homelessness, and then drilled down to the root cause, and THAT is what she made her series of presentations about.  Did she stress the importance of developing more safe shelters for women on the street?  address funding needs from local government?  provide safety info for women and families who are homeless?  create a mentoring/partner program of organizations with one demographic of the homeless population.  Truly, I hope she did something that was meaningful to her, but that was also measurable and sustainable.  Collecting the blankets was a nice add-on, and I certainly hope that very few of her hours were spent on collecting.  Using her leadership should have taken up the majority of her project hours.  And I wonder how she planned for sustainability?

Molly's project sounds like all she did was collect First Communion dresses.  A very nice service project, but it falls short of being Gold quality.  I wonder what her issue was?  And how she identified a root cause, and then created a plan to address it?  I hate to think that she just saw a need to collect the outfits, and stopped there.  I'm hoping that she worked with her Project Advisor to go through the Standards of Excellence on page 2 of the Gold Award Guidelines to create a robust Gold Award Project.  I do hope!