Girl Scouts raise funds to create girl-power art for their school
Kidsday reporters and Girl Scouts, from left, Jenna Murphy, Samantha Ahrens, Brianna Kassatly and Corinne Kassatly sell handmade signs to raise funds for a project to benefit their community. Credit: Rosemary Meehan
We are involved in the Girl Scout Cadette troop at Maria Regina School. There are three different levels of awards that we can achieve starting with bronze, silver and leading up to gold.
As Cadettes, it is our responsibility to work diligently toward our Silver Award with a project called Maria Regina’s Bathroom Boosters, which involves assisting our community. Our plan is to paint inspirational quotes, using vinyl adhesive, onto the walls of the girls bathroom at our middle school. We believe that these positive affirmations will help girls with their self-esteem, insecurities and their level of confidence in what they are capable of doing.
Teens are often exposed to messages about how they look. We often struggle with how to fit in. Positive affirmations can offer many benefits to teens, including overcoming negative self-talk and building self-esteem. The goal is that positive thinking becomes more automatic and negative words become less frequent. We plan to address these issues and influence our school community in a way that they will never forget with this project.
In order to raise the funds needed to complete and perfect this project idea, we created hand-painted wooden signs with different sayings, and sold them at Maria Regina’s Fall Festival in October. To make these signs, we used square and rectangular pieces of wood and painted them either orange, brown, black or light blue, and we used a Cricut machine to print and cut different contact paper lined stencils. Next, we painted on the stencils and peeled back the contact paper, leaving behind sayings such as blessed, grateful, love, pumpkin spice and everything nice, and farm fresh pumpkins.
We created 25 signs for the day of the festival, and to our surprise these signs, priced at $12 each, sold out in an hour! We also received additional supplies from one of our teachers to make an additional 20 signs, which boosted our total profit to about $630. These funds will be used to buy materials for our Silver Award project including paint, paint brushes and vinyl.
As a group, we hope to leave a mark on the school that we love so much, and we wish to inspire other girls to be confident in themselves and others.
Rosemary Meehan's eighth-grade class, Maria Regina School, Seaford
