By Anelia K. Dimitrova
Earning a Girl Scouts recognition takes effort and discipline.
Not to mention enterprise and enthusiasm.
That’s what the members of Girl Scouts Troop 4029 did as they demonstrated this summer to earn the Bronze Award, the highest honor for a junior Girl Scout.
The girls’ goal was to repair and paint the meet-and-greet area at the Cedar Bend Humane Society and buy materials to build a bench in that space. This is the room where prospective adoptive parents meet pets for the first time. The bench was delivered to the Humane Society on Wednesday.
But in order to get to this worthy goal, which will no doubt be so appreciated by the people and the pets at the Humane Society, the girls had to raise the money for the materials they needed to upgrade the room.
They accomplished their fundraising goal by rolling up their sleeves, and with guidance from three adults, gathered to clean up trash on College Hill two Saturdays in a row.
I caught up with them on their second cleanup of College Hill on Aug. 16, so I followed them around for an hour to learn a bit about them and their efforts.
As the girls arrived around 9 a.m. on that Saturday morning, they were greeted by Girl Scouts leaders Crystal Wilken and Lisa Gordon, as well as Krystle Roberts, a dedicated volunteer. One by one, they grabbed their work supplies from the Social House, a bar on the Hill, and chatted while getting ready for the cleanup.
They knew what to expect and what to do, so the start of the day was quick and the operation efficient.
Before they set off to their designated spots, Kyle Dehmlow, the president of the College Hill Association, and owner of The Social House, gave the group some direction and wished them good luck.
Then the troop split into smaller teams.
The cleanup effort definitely illustrated the lesson that money is earned, not handed out, and that hard work is rewarded.
But the girls, too, had a lesson to teach. In between the chatter and the excitement of doing a good deed, they came up with some suggestions.
Instead of tossing discarded items on the street, they concluded, adults would do better if they used the trash cans on the Hill.
There was as much kid humor in their commentary as there was unvarnished truth, and it all added to their shared experience.
“You never know what you are going to find, trust me,” one of the girls told me before the start of the cleanup.
One team went up College Hill, picking up, often with the help of metal trash picker devices, cigarette butts, food wrappings and plastic bags blown by the wind.
Another team headed to the parking lot behind the Social House. There, the finds included empty beer bottles, cans and plastic cups.
By far one of the most intriguing item they found there was a credit card, which seemed so out of place in the grass on the sidewalk.
That team’s leader, Lisa Gordon, a teacher at Clarksville Elementary, made this discovery a teachable moment by briefly explaining the importance of a credit card. She then said she would return it to the issuing institution after the cleanup because the card’s owner might be worried about its whereabouts.
After about an hour, the teams gathered at Pettersen Plaza, the space which anchors the north end of the Hill right next to Jimmy John’s. Named after C. Hugh Pettersen, the late founder of the College Hill Neighborhood Association and College Hill Arts Festival, the plaza offers generous space with seating under the shade of growing trees, beautiful lighting and a marker with the words College Hill.
I had asked the girls to gather for a photo there and they obliged but not before going through the grassy areas at the plaza and picking up some more plastic cups.
With the bulk of the work complete, it was time for a commemorative photo.
After the lineup and the “say cheeses,” the girls were ready to return to their task, and I was ready to reflect on what we, as a community, can learn about ourselves using cleanups as the class material.
Words like respect and ownership come to mind, but of everything I witnessed, one girl’s words vibed with me the most.
“I am being a superhero, I am saving the earth,” she said of the cleanup.