Saturday Nov. 19th an award ceremony for Dakota Robinson, Senior Girl Scout of Shell Lake Troop 4392, was held to recognize her for earning the Girl Scout Silver Award, which is one of the highest awards in Girl Scouting. Designed to help girls explore careers and gain leadership abilities, the Silver Award can be earned as an individual or as a group. Girls must be between the ages of 11 and 14 or entering the 6th grade to begin working towards this award and it must be completed by Sept 30th of the year they are entering the 9th grade.
Girls must first submit a plan for approval from the Girl Scout Council before beginning there project. Then they must first earn three charms, the Girl Scout Leadership Award charm, the Girl Scout Silver Career Charm and the Girl Scout Silver 4B’s Challenge Charm. Then they must earn at least three interest project awards of their choosing that go along with their project. The Earn Your Own Business Interest Project Award and the Studio 2B Focus: Uniquely Me! Charm is then earned.
The requirements teach girls to set goals and to identify and find a solution for a problem in the community. The biggest piece of the Silver Award is planning and developing the project. The project must take at least 40 hours to complete and provide a service to the community. Once all the requirements have been met and approved the Girl Scout must submit a Final Report to the council for final approval.
Every activity and badge earned must be documented in this report, including the date it was received and a signature from the supervising advisor. Girls must describe in detail how they helped the community and how the project was completed. The start and completion dates must be included, and the reasons why the project was chosen. Girls also must describe who benefited from the project and what was ultimately learned and achieved.
Dakota’s project was called, “The Amazing Monarch, Flight for Life.” She completed all requirements including choosing to earn the Plant Life Badge, Eco-Action Badge, and the Leadership Badge Interest projects. She has spent the last 4 years volunteering with Happy Tonics and the Monarch Butterfly Habitat, attending events at the Ag research farm, helping host environmental film fests over the summer, as well as gardening of herbs, flowers and vegetables in container gardens at Shell Lake Friendship Commons. She gave presentations at the butterfly habitat and IV Annual Earth Day Event, and was part of the Blessing of the butterfly habitat.
Dakota created a petition to stop the use of pesticides and road side moving during migration season, which has been sent on to the state government and she hopes to get enough signatures and send it on the president. She collected, bagged and handed out milkweed seeds for people to plant, to help sustain the monarch and she gave several speeches on the monarch’s plight. In all she spent 171 hours on this project. Although the project is officially over, she never passes up the chance to spread the word and hopefully gains new advocates for the monarch butterfly, after her ceremony she gave her presentation again to some of the local area brownies who were present.
The ceremony included The Brownie smile song sang by Shell Lake’s Brownie troop 4475, Junior Girl scout Emily Lloyd led the pledge of allegiance, Girl scout Promise and Girl Scout Law, Dakota was presented and pinned with her Silver Award by one of her troop Leaders Karen LLoyd, followed by punch made by Emily LLoyd and cake.
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