Rob and the California George Family

The Girl Scouts have a series of awards that lead to the Gold Award (the Girl Scout equivalent of the Eagle Scout rank). The series starts with the Bronze Award and then goes on to the Silver Award. The Gold Award is completed by the end of High School. The awards require leadership, meeting goals, and performing a community service project.

Bethany and a friend worked together on their Silver Award service project last summer. They chose Ronald McDonald House of Orange County as the organization to work with on their project. They each put in more than double the service hours required.

The main focus of the project was a “books on tape” type of deliverable. The girls gathered around a dozen cloth bags and included a set of children’s books in each bag. They then recorded each book to an MP3 file and made a CD for each bag that matched the books in the bag. They also raised funds to purchase portable CD players for each bag. Ronald McDonald house now checks the bags out to kids who can listen to the books on CD and read along.

We recently delivered the project to the grateful recipient. In addition to the book bags, the girls also delivered the following items:
• Notebook with paperwork for book bag checkout system
• 51 pounds of can tabs (they recycle the aluminum)
• Several boxes of donated adult and children’s books for the house library
• Several boxes of donated food from a neighborhood food drive

I don’t have the exact statistics for pounds of food or number of books, but the delivery jammed the back of our Suburban.

It was a nearly overwhelming project, but the girls stuck to it and got it done. It was easily as big or bigger than many Eagle projects that I have seen.

Labels: Bethany, Scouts