This summer, I think that a lot of us felt the need to start getting a lot more informed about social justice issues. The kids clearly felt this need, too, and we had a lot of great conversations... which led to a lot of great questions...
...which I did not feel equipped to answer.
I did what I generally do, then, when asked a question I do not know the answer to--I suggested that we look it up!
Rather, I suggested that we rewrite two of the Girl Scout badges at the kids' levels--the Cadette Finding Common Ground badge and the Senior Social Innovator badge--to encompass a short study on social justice, during which we could research the answers to our most pressing questions and find out more about the issues that we felt most called to.
There are so many--too many!--social justice issues to be able to give them all our careful attention during one short study, so we decided that we'd focus on just Black Lives Matter and the LGBTIA+ pride movement for the moment.
We spent another interesting afternoon working on a giant puzzle and listening to interviews of people who represent important moments in LGBTQIA+ history. Or rather, the kids got to work on our puzzle, while I stayed at the laptop and ready-referenced the questions that they continually peppered me with. AIDS activism in the early 1980s and the Stonewall Riots are the only historical events that I feel confident lecturing off-the-cuff about to the kids, so thank goodness for Wikipedia!
If you're interested in the history of the AIDS epidemic (it has a lot of modern parallels!), I highly recommend this book:
It's intense, and so, so, so sad, but it's also a vivid example of the extreme amount of social activism that's required to achieve even a starting point of social justice. AIDS activists sacrificed their careers, their reputations, and sometimes their lives just to get to a point where our government could begin to consider that perhaps we should not deliberately let entire swathes of people succumb to a pandemic.
On another afternoon, we popped popcorn and watched this documentary on the Stonewall riots:
It's a good example of how yes, you DO sometimes have to commit civil disobedience to right a social wrong that's been legislated into existence.
Here's another good example:
There IS a Book Three, but we're still on hold for it at the library!
John Lewis' story is epic. I'm ashamed to admit that I knew nothing about the Freedom Riders until I read his story. I'm sure my school system failed me in not teaching this, and then I failed myself by still not learning it after I was grown up and supposed to teach myself everything I'd missed out on learning as a kid.
As another project on another day, the kids looked up book lists featuring POC and LGBTQIA+ people. There are several book lists referenced in this article about things white people can do to advance racial justice. There are a ton more great books in this list of children's and middle-grade LGBTQIA+ literature. The kids requested all the ones that looked interesting to them from our public library, and if there were any that the library didn't already own, they were to fill out a Suggest a Purchase form for it. Our library is awesome, and I think that Will only managed to find one book on all of these lists that the library didn't own! We got a bunch of new stuff to read for ourselves, though--I was especially excited to see that Jazz, whose picture book I always recommend to people as THE way to explain what it means to be transgender to anyone young or old, has a memoir now!
The Cadette Finding Common Ground badge wanted Syd to explore civil debate. Watching protest march footage certainly covers that, but at that point in the summer I didn't want to actually take the kids to anything in-person, but I did want to find something that showed how anyone can agitate for social justice, so we also spent another afternoon working on our paint-by-numbers and listening to protest poetry and protest songs. Here's an extensive list of protest poetry--shout-out to Paul Laurence Dunbar, who we previously met while learning about flying machines!
The kids sat with all of the research that we'd done for a few days, then came together to create a list entitled "How to be an Ally." Here's part of it:
They did pretty well, although their list shows that I didn't do enough to help them feel empowered and able to take direct action, perhaps, as much of the list is more about amplifying the message or showing support for the message, etc. Or maybe that's a product of this pandemic, when I don't feel comfortable encouraging the kids to attend protests or physically volunteer their time, so then they don't think of those options. But ultimately, their list is do-able and kid-friendly, and they each chose an item from it to do right then:
Syd intends to make digital copies of her hand-drawn pinback buttons (in the top photo), so that anyone with a 1" pinback button maker can download them and make them, too, but then high school started, and her algebra and biology teachers are definitely making up for the lack of work that her French and art teachers are giving her. So pinback button designs might have to wait until she learns everything there is to learn about algebra and biology first...
In other news, Will's teen police club, run by our local law enforcement officers, had a meeting (in the brief window when our community was starting to get back to doing stuff like that, before they stopped again) specifically to discuss Black Lives Matter and the instances of police brutality that have been so much in the news. Will came prepared (because I'd given her a list of these instances and required her to research them, summarize them, and then write her opinions), and although overall the discussion wasn't the absolute greatest, it wasn't terribly awful, either. I don't think that the officers who volunteer their time to work with the community's children are bad-hearted, but I don't think that they're exactly the wokest, either. And at one point, when an officer was discussing our farmer's market controversy and told the children that there was no proof that the Schooner Creek farm was run by Nazis, Will spoke right up and told everyone there that our family knows them and they're definitely Nazis.
Technically, I think they're actually "white identitarians" who refuse to admit that they're racist and instead insist that they just want to evict all POC from this entire country that was originally stolen from its indigenous people, but whatever. Everyone knew what she meant.
And I guess if I was looking for direct action towards social justice, then stepping up to contradict a police officer and tell a group of your peers a bit about your own experience with racism is pretty direct!
One week before our community's pandemic closures began, back when we were still happily anticipating a spring full of field trips, fashion shows, and fun adventures with friends, the kids and I had one more magical day at one of our favorite places in the world, the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.
This was an especially fun activity, and both kids, who worked at a table separate from me, declared that it was one of the favorite activities they've ever led here! At both of our tables, we had lots of die-cuts of living things--people in real colors and people in fun colors, dragons, frogs, bears, etc., along with markers, foam stickers, and sticky-backed googly eyes that were incredibly difficult to separate from their backings.
Small children would wander up, with their adults or with a school group, and I would invite them to "make a character," and tell them that when they were done, I wanted them to tell me all about the character they'd made. The kids would choose a die-cut, settle in with markers and stickers, and one-by-one I'd ask each kid if they wanted googly eyes for their character. If they said yes, I'd ask how many they wanted, and then painstakingly unpeel the backings of that many eyes for them. Normally, it's really important for kids to do their own work, but those backings were practically IMPOSSIBLE to peel. It was bonkers how difficult they were!
When each kid had finished, they were excited to tell me about the character they'd created. I'd ask them to tell me what their character looked like on the outside, and as they did so we'd talk about how that was a physical trait. Then I'd ask them to tell me what their character felt like on the inside, and as they did so we'd talk about how that was a personality trait. Then, if we had time, they could tell me a whole story about their character, and if we didn't have time, I'd remind them that they could tell a story about their character when they were home.
OMG the kids were SO INTO THIS ACTIVITY! I don't know if it was the open-ended nature of the activity, the unusual materials they could access, or the agency they felt in story-telling, but they universally loved the snot out of this activity! And mentoring an activity is always much more fun when the kids are into it, so it turned out to be a terrific way to spend our morning.
We generally volunteer in the mornings, so afterward our tradition is to eat our packed lunch in the museum's big cafeteria. We do get an employee discount, but even with that the food is too expensive to justify three entire lunches every time we go, so we bring our lunch, but we always bring something that requires a bounty of condiments, because one notable fact about the Children's Museum is that its condiments bar hosts EVERY CONDIMENT. I'm talking ranch dressing. I'm talking honey mustard. I'm talking barbecue sauce. I'm talking hot sauce!
Seriously, it's, like, our favorite thing. You haven't lived until you've gotten up early to bake frozen chicken strips, put them in a Children's Museum-branded lunch bag, and eaten them cold with fourteen different dipping sauces.
Ugh, I'm craving it right now!
After lunch, we've generally got a few items on our museum to-do list before we make the drive back home. On this day, there was a brand-new exhibit on Mo Willems to explore!
Here is my favorite Mo Willems book:
Here is my second-favorite Mo Willems book:
I'm not as into the Elephant and Piggy series, but the kids definitely blew through them all when they were each learning to read. And yep, we sat in the museum gallery's reading area and blew through them all again.
And then learned to draw them for ourselves!
Will is smiling like a brat in this photo because in the video Mo Willems has just said, "Write your name on your drawing," and she has done so:
Most of this gallery is geared to the very young, but one of the many terrific things about the Children's Museum is that the galleries always include awesome stuff to educate and engage big people, too. Check out this exhibit of Mo Willems' original sketches for his books!
Syd was VERY interested to learn that he uses charcoal pencil for these sketches. He must be a very tidy artist, and we want to know how he avoids smudging charcoal all over his paper!
Fun side fact: Mo Willems is currently a Kennedy Center artist-in-residence, and during the pandemic he's putting out a daily series of videos. There's some cool how-to-draw stuff, but also really interesting inside info about his creative process and how he makes his art:
After Mo Willems, we of COURSE had to visit the dinosaurs--
--and then we made another visit to Anne Frank. The kids are currently working on a short study of her for this monthly patch program through Girl Scouts of Central Illinois, and of course I've used the patch as an excuse to also review the Holocaust through the lens of personal accounts of child victims, and to incorporate a diary-writing practice. Old or young, in circumstances ordinary or extraordinary, we own our own stories and we have the power to tell them.
The kids and I have had a lot of conversations about what makes people like Anne Frank or Eva Kor ordinary, and what makes them extraordinary (and as I write this, it's just now occurred to me to make the connection between this and the character trait activity that we led on this day!), and I'm always interested to see how visiting the same exhibit we've been visiting for the kids' whole lives, but with a new focus in our minds, leads us to notice different things. This, for instance, is possibly the first time I've noticed this particular photo, in which a young Anne Frank is attending a Montessori school much like, if you count the beads and bead cabinet you can clearly see--
--the Montessori school my own kids attended for a time.
It's important not to do any tale-telling about what I see and hear when the kids and I are on duty, but here we were just guests, and so I feel free to tell you that while we were all sitting on benches in Anne's exhibit, watching a short documentary on her life, a child sitting in front of us turned to her adult during a scary part of the film and asked, "Does Anne die?"
Friends, that adult said, literally, and I quote, "No, Anne doesn't die."
I gasped in horror! That's... I mean... that's so not right! I would have said something right then and there except that I've seen this little documentary a dozen or more times, and so I was watching the kid more than the film when it came to the part where the narrator explains how Anne and Margot die. The kid made a noise when the narrator said that, and shot her head around to give a betrayed look to her adult, but her adult was across the room on her phone and so didn't see it.
The second-to-last thing that we always do at the Children's Museum is ride the carousel:
And the last thing that we do is wander the gift shop. I don't normally have a lot of patience for gift shops, but this one is legitimately cool--they deliberately vary their stock so they're always adding new things, like this authentic made-in-Greece Greek dress that Syd talked me into buying for her by telling me that she'd wear it all the time AND use it as part of her Halloween costume this year:
In this photo I'm making her hold my ouzo because it's also Greek...
I never buy myself anything (but if you want to buy me a museum-branded hoodie and a messenger bag, feel free!), but I do take pictures of books that I'm going to request from the public library as soon as it opens again:
I love these magical days at the museum. I love connecting in ever-new ways with a place that we've been visiting since my girls were very small. I love working with children, and the challenge of mentoring a brand-new-to-all-of-us activity for a revolving cast of kiddos. I love our traditions of dipping sauces and carousel horses, and keeping track of how many people we tell the location of the nearest bathroom to.
I'm really, really, really looking forward to getting back there.
Will is in her final months as a Girl Scout Cadette, and also in her final weeks (at least, I DEARLY hope so!) of her Silver Award project.
To earn the Silver Award, the highest award that a Cadette can achieve, a Girl Scout Cadette must create, initiate, and complete a big project that fulfills a long-term need in the world around her. It must be sustainable, so that it works toward a permanent solution, not a temporary fix, and she must ideally spend at least 50 hours planning and producing this project. It's her project, so she must take the initiative and complete all the steps herself, doing lots of things that she's never done before and participating in the adult world at a level that she's likely never before experienced. An adult adviser guides her, offers advice, and helps her work through problems, but the project belongs to the girl.
It's a lot to tackle for a sixth-through-eighth-grader, but like much of the Girl Scout experience, it's experiential learning at its best.
Which is what I try to remember when mentoring Will's Silver Award project starts stressing me out!
Will did a lot of brainstorming for her Silver Award project a year ago (and let me tell you, a year has turned out to be just almost not enough time for this project! I am telling my current crop of Cadettes who bridged last fall that they need to start their projects this fall or by Christmas at the latest, giving them 9-12 more months than Will had), but had, as I think is fairly typical, a lot of trouble coming up with a project that inspired her. She really wanted to do something legislative, but I encouraged her to save that for a Gold Award project, as I doubted a year would be enough time for a project like that. Then she thought that maybe she'd do something for or with the national park system, since she loves Junior Ranger badges so much. She even did some networking at the GIRL 2017 convention, and a park ranger there gave her the contact info of a ranger who would be a good person to hear her ideas.
The Little Free Library program! With its founder, reeling everyone in and speaking super enthusiastically and handing out fun patches!
The next time I asked Will to show me her brainstorming ideas, a Little Free Library for our town was at the top of her list, and I encouraged her to dig in and go for it.
Of course, just setting up a Little Free Library any old place isn't doing a lot to solve a "problem," so I encouraged Will to work through the steps to earn the 2018 Global Action Award, which is all about the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. As part of her badge work, I asked her to find a Sustainable Development Goal that could apply to her Little Free Library project. She realized that Quality Education was a good fit, and I helped her work out some specific ways in which a Little Free Library could improve access to quality education.
Using the Quality Education Sustainable Development Goal as her lens, Will decided that putting her Little Free Library in a public park would ensure the most access to reading material to the widest population.
Her next step, then, was to figure out who to consult about the possibility of putting a Little Free Library in a public park! We knew that there are a couple of parks in our town that already have Little Free Libraries (and that's okay, because a Cadette doesn't have to invent the entire wheel for her Silver Award project--even knowing it's already been done before, this is very much a big enough project for a Cadette!), so I Googled them to see if I could get any more information, and found an online article that covered one such library's groundbreaking, and included the names of the library's sponsors, the group that sponsored it, etc. I showed this article to Will and encouraged her to contact one of these people to ask them some questions about how they structured their process.
I would have asked one of the named sponsors, myself, but Will chose to instead email the author of the article, who happened to be the city's communications director and also the absolutely most perfect person to contact. That woman not only replied to Will promptly, but also found the exact person in the city administration whom Will should be dealing with, and connected the two by email!
I just need to say that I am sure that for any adult, working with a child who is a project leader must be a novel situation, and yet every adult that Will has worked with throughout this process has been just wonderful to her, treating her respectfully as an equal, but at the same time having a LOT of patience with the obvious learning curve she's experiencing in writing good business emails, summarizing and explaining her project, returning emails promptly with the relevant information, etc. People are really great!
I helped Will proofread her emails, and suggested edits, but Will was responsible for contacting the city official, explaining her project to him, and asking him for permission. He then asked for a meeting to hear her ideas in person, so then she had to prepare for that. What to say. What to wear! How to answer his questions! It was a big deal!
While this research and emailing was going on, Will also was working on the physical library, itself. She used the Little Free Library site to find a map of all of the Little Free Libraries in our town, and we took several trips to drive around and see as many of them as possible, often coming across unregistered Little Free Libraries and checking those out, as well. I encouraged Will to look at all the details of each Little Free Library, in particular its location, construction, installation, and special features, to decide what she thought would work best for her own build.
Here are some photos of her favorites:
Will liked those really unusual Little Free Libraries best--I mean, of course!--but decided that the following style would be the easiest to build, as well as the most practical for her purpose:
As you'll see, this was... ultimately not completely correct, but it IS a learning process!
Will researched plans for Little Free Libraries similar to what she liked, and when her grandparents came to visit to watch Syd dancing in The Nutcracker, her grandfather spent a day helping her build her first Little Free Library:
She stained it and sealed it, and it turned out just beautiful.
This, then, was the model that she brought to her meeting with our town's Parks and Rec official, and it was the model that he approved. Will told him what she was looking for in a location, and he helped her find a city park that serves an economically disadvantaged community, so that placing the Little Free Library there would hopefully increase the population's access to literature.
Parks and Rec took care of getting the site surveyed for utilities (call 411 before you dig!), and Will contacted the manager of the grounds crew and settled a time to meet them there and together install her Little Free Library. I invited the rest of our Girl Scout troop, and the girls all got a chance to help dig:
Will assisted in the installation itself:
She filled it with books, and it was perfect!
And from this moment on is where there started to be a LOT of problems.
Like, a LOT of problems.
Part of Will's commitment to Parks and Rec was that she would be the steward for this Little Free Library, so we drove back a few days later so she could check on it and restock, and we discovered that it had been vandalized. The back was cracked all the way across, with a boot print to show what had done it, and the Plexiglass from the front door was missing.
Will cut a new back, stained it, and mounted it over the broken one:
She cut new Plexiglass, which she will readily inform you is the thing that she hates doing the most in the world, and set it in with silicone caulk:
The next time we came back, the Plexiglass was gone again. We figured it had gotten "displaced" before the caulk could set, so this time Will unmounted the door, took it home, replaced the Plexiglass, sealed it, and then returned the door and remounted it.
--and then came back one day to find that the entire door was broken off.
Will did a lot of troubleshooting for this repair, and eventually decided that a clear door was just not working. Instead, she cut a plywood door--
--painted it, and because she was worried that people wouldn't understand what was inside if they couldn't see, she stenciled a label on it. We drove her to install it...
...and it was too small.
So she made another door, same process, took her to install it...
...and it was too small, actually smaller than her first try, inspiring my new Word to the Wise, "Measure not, cut a lot!"
Will was SO frustrated by this time, but she DID measure so much more carefully, and cut so much more carefully, and (with some on-site sanding for one sticky-outy part), the third try fit.
There's been one good check-up since then, and I REALLY hope that this sturdier door solves the vandalism/rough usage/whatever is going on, because I have to tell you, I know it's not my project, but whenever I see that someone has damaged my precious baby's hard work, it makes me sick to my stomach.
I mean, at least let her reach the age of 14 before she loses all faith in humanity, you know?
Regardless, this project has so far taught this kid so much. She's got experience writing business emails and attending business meetings, and she better understands professional communication and what is required. She's a more confident builder. She's had more practice speaking with strangers. She has done a LOT of troubleshooting and problem-solving, sooooo much trouble-shooting and problem-solving, and she's learning how to deal gracefully with setbacks and disappointment, and how to just keep working towards a solution. She's seen a couple of kids squealing in delight at the contents of her newly-stocked library, so that was pretty great. And she's figuring out how to plan and handle and (hopefully) complete a very big, long-term project, which is something that will help her throughout her whole life.
Will still doesn't consider her Silver Award project complete at this point, which feels right to me, too. She's done a lot of work here, but most of it has been troubleshooting and problem-solving. That's all great--experiential learning!--but I think she needs to spend more time working on the big picture of her underlying goal of improving access to literature for underserved communities. Here are a few ideas that I've heard her toying with:
Building and installing another Little Free Library in another park to reach more people.
Holding a book drive to ensure a readier supply of books for the library, instead of relying on community exchange as one could do in a more affluent area where most people could be assumed to have excess books to share out.
Hosting a community literacy fair at her library, perhaps involving the whole troop in fun activities and free books for community children.
Hosting a Girl Scout workshop at the library, also with the troop to help with activities, but with the goal of doing service and garnering book donations, and rewarding the attendees with a fun patch.
Writing instructions for constructing and installing a Little Free Library in an economically disadvantaged area, with her advice about hardening the library against vandalism or rough usage, ideally to help other people who want to do this same project. An alternative would be to host such a program at the public library or farmer's market.
Writing lists of recommended books, all of which would be available at the public library, and providing instructions for how to obtain a library card.
I'm not sure what she'll settle on, but I am VERY much encouraging her to get whatever it is rolling by the end of the summer. She's still got a lot of paperwork to fill out and essays to write to apply for her Silver Award, and I want all of that stuff filed and recorded well before she bridges to Girl Scout Senior in October.
And then? On to Gold!
P.S. Come hang out with me on my Craft Knife Facebook page and I'll share more WIPs and Girl Scout hijinks with you!
