The silver award is a big project for middle school aged girl scouts. It is our first project that affects our community in such a big way. It is also our first project that gets passed down to other girl scout troops once we have completed it. So what did our troop do for our Silver Award?

Troop 3662 collected, organized, and hosted a Christmas Giveaway Shop for tenants in an affordable housing unit in South Arlington! Here's the steps we took to make this happen.First, we gathered new/gently used clothes, toys, and accessories as items for the "shop".Then, we set them up in a low income housing apartment building, giving each of the items a "price" (a number from one to five). On the day of the shop, we gave each family an equal amount of tickets based on the number of items we collected. Once the shop started, we helped the customers find the clothing, toys, or accessories they needed or wanted. We also gave out hot chocolate! Afterwards, Santa came in and talked to the kids, giving each of them a candy cane. When the shop was over, we still had extra clothes, so we gave the rest of the donations to Goodwill and a hospital. We raised a total of 260 toys, 1,088 articles of clothing, and 246 "other".

This project was a really cool way of learning about other people. So often, when people our age think about people who do not have the same privileges as us, we think about people in far off countries with different lives. Meeting those people in person helped us realize that not only do these people live right here in our city, but they also lead lives very similar to ours. I think it was a very enlightening experience.

Through this project, my girl scout troop also learned a lot of responsibility, teamwork, and most importantly, people skills! Interacting with all those people despite a major language barrier was tough, but interesting.

The silver award project was an amazing experience! It was a hard project to do, but we learned some new lessons, helped our community, and had a lot of fun doing it!