Girl Scout Troop 30046 in Bristol recently completed their Bronze Award, the highest honor a Girl Scout Junior can earn and requires each girl spend a minimum of 20 hours in support of a project that betters her local community.
The troop has 11 girls, all 5th grade students (their level is Juniors).
The troop’s project was focused on raising awareness and support for the foster care system in Kenosha County. The troop has done a number of activities for the project including:
- Research on foster care, generating questions they had and then going to the library to find answers
- Interviews with social workers, foster parents, and foster support networks (like 1Hope and the Foster Closet of Kenosha)
- They spent a significant amount of time at the Foster Closet of Kenosha working to organize their storage system, putting together shelving units, and going through clothes and labeling them
- The girls purchased materials and put together personal care toiletry bags for older girls in foster care
- Each girl participated at least once in putting together a bag for a foster child placement, and several girls participated in the delivery to the families
- The troop designed stickers and then did a social media campaign to select a winner. Fifty foster families in the area have received the sticker – encouraging them to put them on laptops or water bottles to raise awareness for foster families and hopefully generate interest in signing up to be a foster parent. One thing the troop learned is there is a dire shortage of willing foster parents in the system so they really wanted to focus on increasing awareness.
Members of he the troop are: Adelaide Gould, Alaina Rose, Alana Ruha, Allison Jozwiak, Avery McDonnell, Charlotte Erickson, Charlotte Hofer, Ellie Hansche, Emrie Glasel, Katherine Kratowicz, Leah Phillips, Troop Leader Cyndi Jozwiak.
