4/15/21

I actually got quite a lot done today. I reached out to some people about help with badge guides and possibilities for live sessions and guest presentations. After that, I worked on two different badge guides: “On My Own” and “Buying Power.” I got the main structure for the guides, and now I have to edit them and review them with some people to make sure they make sense. I also decided to make a Discord server that I can hopefully promote online to hopefully make a more active community. It’s good to have an Instagram and website, but a Discord server allows people to have direct conversations, group conversations, voice chats, and plus I can post notifications that will directly go to everyone about events. It took some research because I’ve only ever made small servers for my friends where I didn’t need bots or lots of channels, but I think I have a good start.

 

4/14/21

Today I did a deeper reading of the Girl Scout Handbook. Honestly, it was really entertaining to read, but I’m not sure how much it informed my project. I mean, it was really interesting to learn about the history of the Girl Scouts through what they did at the time. I think something that I learned from the book that can help my project is examining the accessibility of the resources I create. There are some badges that they did away with because times changed and they wouldn’t be possible for many girls to do today, for example the Milkmaid badge where some of the steps are: milk a cow and make a dairy product. Or the “Airplane” badge where you were required to get your pilot license and pilot a plane a certain number of miles. I think all badges should be accessable to most people, and there are quite a few badges even today that just aren’t options for some girls. I want to make sure that I can make my guides accessible enough that lots of girls from different backgrounds can earn them.

 

4/13/21

I had my first cohort meeting today and I’m really excited to continue working with them. It will be nice to get a new set of eyes on my project. I learned through my Gold Award that if you spend too much time on a project by yourself, you get stuck. Hopefully we can all give each other ideas, and maybe I can even get connections for guest speakers through other people. 

I’ve pretty much decided that through the rest of April, I will work on research, planning, and Badge Guides. That will open up the whole month of May for planning and hosting live events. For the rest of the week, I’m really going to focus on outreach and website/social media updating/finalization. Then I can spend the last weeks of April working on Badge Guides and promoting events.

 

4/12/21

I’m really excited because this morning I got an email from the woman who represents Judaline Cassidy, the founder of Tools and Tiaras. She said that Judaline could speak at one of my events, it just depends on the day and time. And she said that since I am a high school student and my project aligns with Judaline’s views, her speaking fee would not apply! I sent some emails to figure out the scheduling, and hopefully this can happen. It would be amazing if she could speak because not only is she a super inspirational woman, but she also does a lot of public speaking, so hopefully she will already have a standard presentation she could do.

I also did my first read-through of the Girl Scout handbook, and it was interesting to say the least. I learned a lot about the history of Girl Scouts through the context of the book. There used to be shooting badges, housekeeping badges, and the book just very much has that 1913 tone. I’m excited to do a second readthrough of it and pay a bit more attention.