Girl Scout Silver Project

{The Girl Scout Silver Award is the highest award a Girl Scout Cadette can earn—they earn the award by completing a 50 hour project dedicated to improving the community in a lasting way.}

This journey started one year ago with a visit to a place called WIND youth services.  WIND is shelter serving youth experiencing homelessness who need safety from the streets and access to resources to help them move from crisis to healthy functioning and independence.  First, we met with the outreach coordinator, Arlene, to tour the center and brainstorm with her about potential projects that the H and S would be able to do for their Girl Scout Silver Award.  One of the things Arlene suggested was a scrapbook that would enable her to show potential donors in the community what the program was accomplishing, so they could continue to get the funding necessary to keep the shelter open.  Of course we knew we had to do this - we LOVE scrapbooking!  

The next thing the girls did was a write an email to Becky Higgins to ask if she would be willing to donate one of her Project Life Album Kits.  The answer was "YES"!  So exciting!  
After the photos were gathered and printed the girls spend several afternoons compiling 3 years worth of events into the album.  Super simple!  To help the girls tell the story,  someone from WIND came to our house to look at the pictures and tell us about them so that the girls could add some journaling along with the photos.

Organizing the photos

Putting them into the Project Life Album

Some of the pages...

Here S and H are presenting the scrapbook to Fonda the shelter's project manager.

The second part of our project was creating a toddler play area.   Since many of the youth WIND serves have babies of their own, they needed an enclosed space for those children to play while the teens use the shelter's services to shower,  search for jobs, access health care, etc.

The girls raised the money for this through the Mother Daughter Bingo event we put on in December.

After several shopping trips, work days, and some help from their dads -  here is what they were able to create ...

As a mom and a leader I am so proud of all of the hard work these two girls put into this project!  It truly is something that will live on and help many people in our community for years to come!

1st Date

This week Ben worked up the courage to ask his friend Brenna to go to the High school's Aurora Dance.

Of course, there are lots of stories leading up to this moment ... 

but I won't embarrass him ... except to post these few pictures ;)

one happy boy!