For Girls…FOR REAL!

By Annie, 15
National Advisory Committee member

My trip to New York for the "Macy Magic" meeting was the best Girl Scout trip I've ever been a part of. It beat my trip sailing in the Florida Keys, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and caving and white-water rafting!

Expect the Unexpected

When I heard that I'd been picked by Girl Scouts of the USA as one of the girls from North Carolina to go to the Edith Macy Conference Center in New York, I didn't know what to expect.

In fact, I didn't even know exactly why I was going. All I knew was that I was being flown up there to talk about how to improve Girl Scouts. I was pretty scared because I didn't really have any ideas about improving Girl Scouts.

Getting to Work

It only took an hour for the girls on a new committee to get to know each other. It was amazing how 12 girls from Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Carolina, and New Jersey could all get along so well and relate to one another. Even working was really fascinating as we learned all about the future look of Girl Scouting and gave our input on how to make it better.

Future of Girl Scouts

By the end of the weekend, everyone was a friend and we had discussed many topics from budgets to legislation. We mostly worked on how to get girls more interested in Girl Scouts and how to get them more involved locally and nationally. We worked on ideas such as council-wide meetings for all the girls in a council and a National Girl Congress.

We also got to give our opinions on the new "Interest Projects for Girls 11-17" coming out in October (they are awesome!). We discussed the activities that will be at the National Convention in Atlanta. I had so much fun at "Macy Magic" and now I feel as if I've done something that will really help Girl Scouts go in the right direction.

Ingredients for an Awesome Meeting

• MARSHMALLOWS: It's bound to happen during a meeting: energy levels run low and the meeting stalls. Whenever we got bored, our advisors supplied plenty of large marshmallows for us to throw around. Crazy, right? Not really…throwing marshmallows was a safe, fun way to kick-start the meeting again. Here's how it worked: anyone could yell, "Marshmallows!" to start the marshmallow fight and then someone would yell, "Clean up!" after about 3-5 minutes.
  
  
• NOODLES: To keep the energy up, our advisors also provided us with Styrofoam™ noodles to play with. Besides fake sword fighting and noodle bashing, a game of marshmallow baseball is a great way to pass time between meetings!
  
  
• DRUMS & PIZZA: As a reward for our hard work, our advisors took us to New York City for a Friday night of music, dancing, singing, drumming, and pizza! We went to an awesome off-Broadway show called "Drumstruck." Each chair in the 400-seat auditorium had a tom-tom drum waiting on it for the audience. When the show started, the cast of South and West African tribespersons invited us to join in their drumming and singing. We even got to meet one of stars after the show!
  
  
• R.O.P.E.S.: We were involved with setting guidelines for how we would work together. Using a strategy called R.O.P.E.S., we came up with a lot of words for what each letter stood for (R=respectful, O=open-minded, P=polite, E=energetic, S=sensitivity, for example). We then used these "R.O.P.E.S." as reminders of how we expected to treat each other and work to the best of our abilities.
  
  
• LAUGHTER (duh!) The work we had before us was serious but our advisors made sure that laughter was a part of almost everything we did!
  
  
• HUGS At the end of the weekend, we packed up to go our separate ways. Before we left, our last meeting was a teary goodbye and a big group hug.