Frankfort Girl Scouts Earn Silver Award For Community Projects

FRANKFORT, IL — Members of Frankfort Girl Scout Troop 70780 recently learned about giving back to the community and earned the prestigious Silver Award, the second-highest award in Girl Scouts, for their efforts.

The Girl Scouts who earned the Silver Award are: Brett Gentry, Maeve Brown, Savannah Williams, Liliana Terlep, Madeline Bond, Maggie Brown, Abby Stabrawa, Molly Czechanski, Jordan Scott, Abby Bunch, Lia Spychalski and Teagan Powers, said Girl Scout Troop 70780 Co-Leader Meghan McCauley-Brown. Julie Terlep is the other co-leader of the troop.

All of the girls are from Frankfort and are currently in eighth and ninth grade, McCauley-Brown said.

The girls were divided into four groups, and each group worked to come up with ideas for projects and how to implement them, McCauley-Brown said.

Planning started in 2020, McCauley-Brown said. After months of brainstorming and reaching out to community organizations, the girls decided on their projects.

Gentry, Maeve Brown, and Williams created Positivity Trees for the Frankfort Public Library. The girls' goal was to spread kindness in the community during the pandemic, when many people were experiencing hard times, McCauley-Brown said. The girls spent more than 50 hours creating small, artificial trees with colorful laminated leaves with quotes of kindness to help inspire the community, McCauley-Brown said.

Terlep, Bond and Maggie Brown made care kits for seniors at The Cottages of New Lenox. The kits included handmade pillows, activity books, and handmade crafts and cards. The girls came up with the idea after hearing about how cut off seniors were from their families and the outside world and "wanted to remind the residents that they are not forgotten," according to McCauley-Brown. The girls spent many hours cutting fabric, stuffing and tying the pillows, creating beaded crafts, and writing out cards for each individual resident, McCauley-Brown said.

Stabrawa, Czechanski and Scott made craft kits for children at the Crisis Center of South Suburbia, based in Tinley Park. They made ten of each type of five different crafts: a kit for a bee, two different rainbow crafts, a flower and coffee filter butterflies, McCauley-Brown said. The girls "wanted to do this so the kids at the Crisis Center could have something fun to do," according to McCauley-Brown.

The final group of Bunch, Spychalski and Powers sewed colorful masks that they donated to a women's shelter in Joliet. The girls wanted to provide interesting, free masks for those in need, McCauley-Brown said.

The girls will spend the rest of the year working on their Legacy Badges before beginning planning for projects to earn their Gold Award, the highest award in Girl Scouts, McCauley-Brown said.

"I'm so proud that they worked so hard," McCauley-Brown said. "It was hard to stay focused. A lot of our initial meetings were over Zoom, and you can kind of lose motivation when that happens. So, just the fact that they stayed focused, they got it done in the timeline, I'm just so proud that they did it."

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