When I started my Senior Project, my essential question was “how can I create meaningful programming for girls in an ever-changing world?”. I knew that I wanted to work with high school Girl Scouts because there would be a lot of room for making that programming (since the higher levels tend to lack in materials), scheduling wouldn’t be dependent on parents so I could connect with girls directly, and I would get the chance to lead girls my own age — something that I hadn’t really done with the Girl Scouts before. When I got the responses from a survey I sent to high school Girl Scouts, I realized that many of the girls shared the same opinions about what they wished they did more of in Girl Scouts: meet new people from outside of their troops. Since it was almost unanimous, I decided to change my essential question to, “how can I create an active and supporting community for high school Girl Scouts?” I figured this question would address the wants of the community, so it would be easy to connect with them. To start answering that question, I worked on creating more community aspects for my project. I made an Instagram account to promote my project and post announcements, and a Discord Server to make more of a sense of community. The issue with this question is that it strongly relied on other people. Now that I’m coming to the end of my project, I realized that I ended up answering my original question more than my second one. I focused on various ways to provide resources through written Badge Guides and live events, and saw the pros and cons of both. Live events can be fantastic resources because it opens the opportunity to meet 

new people, invite experts, and ask questions. However, they can be awkward and slightly disappointing if not many people show up. I still have the majority of my live sessions coming up this week and next, and I am working hard to get as many people to come as possible, especially when the guest speakers are people I don’t personally know ahead of time. This is one of the challenges that I’ve had to overcome throughout my project — reaching out to people and being honest. When reaching out to guest speakers, I had to learn to be realistic in providing estimates on how many people are going to come. When reaching out to possible attendees, I have to be well aware that not everyone who says they will come, will come. 

Even though working with Girl Scouts was a large part of my project, if I had to start over, I might scrap the Girl Scout part and just work on creating resources and programs for high school aged girls in general. Working with the Girl Scouts organization has it’s pros and cons. It is easy to base programming around badges, but there are a lot of restrictions that the organization puts on people working in association with them — for good reasons. If I focused on high school girls in general, I would also have a larger audience.

Even though my project hasn’t grown to the size I hoped it would, I’m still proud of my work and how I pushed myself throughout the project.