GSCCC Announces New Hours of Operation

Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast is pleased to announce new hours of operation, effective September 2, 2017. The change, which includes extending the workday by thirty minutes from Monday to Thursday, will help to accommodate our customers’ needs!

Here at GSCCC, it is important to us to provide the best customer service possible to our volunteers and caregivers, and it was with your valuable input that we made these changes to our office hours. We look forward to better serving all of our members as we continue to work together to build girls of courage, confidence and character who make the world a better place!

The new hours are as follows:

Chesapeake Office Location

Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Chesapeake Retail Location Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Saturday 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. on designated Saturdays
*First Saturday in April through second Saturday in June; and
*First Saturday in September through second Saturday in November

Peninsula Office 

Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Peninsula Retail Location

Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. (This retail location only, closed 1 to 2 p.m. for lunch)
Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
NO SATURDAY HOURS

Council retail staff are happy to take orders by phone and have them ready for pick up during office hours, or customers may request that the package is mailed. Online shopping continues to be an option.

Please email customercare@gsccc.org if you have any questions.

Gold Award Spotlight: Hampton Roads History

Nina, a Girl Scout Ambassador from Newport News, has earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, which is the highest honor and achievement a girl can earn in Girl Scouts.

For her project, Nina worked with The Mariners’ Museum to self-publish a children’s book titled “Life on the USS Monitor: The Little Ship That Saved the Nation, as Told by Frankie the Cat.” The book, which includes hand-drawn illustrations, an elaborate story and images from the archives at The Mariners’ Museum, is a way for younger children to learn about an important event in history, the Battle of Hampton Roads.

“The battle between the ironclads not only affected the pathway of the Civil War, but it transformed shipbuilding for ages to come,” Nina said.

After publishing her book, Nina held book signings and numerous story time and craft workshops at The Mariners’ Museum, the Downtown Hampton Child Development Center, The Watermen’s Museum and the Main Street Library in Newport News. At each event, Nina was able to teach children from the ages of four to 10 about the Battle of Hampton Roads.

“I felt that by appealing to a younger age group through a fictional character like Frankie the cat, children might be more interested in historical fiction,” Nina said.

Nina also created videos in which she explains her project and reads her book that she placed online for anyone to access.

The Gold Award requires girls to identify an issue in the community and carry out a Take Action project to address the matter through leadership work. Nationwide, less than six percent of eligible Girl Scouts earn the Gold Award, which adds Nina to an elite group of female leaders across the country with the honor.

Build Me Up

Dads and other adult male caregivers play a special role in setting girls up for success. Father-daughter relationships lay the foundation for a girl’s confidence and her future relationships with and expectations of men. In June, GSCCC hosted Build Me Up, a workshop for girls and their male caregivers to spend quality time together while taking part in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) challenges. Build Me Up took place at the C. Waldo Scott Center for Hope in Newport News, which provides comprehensive services to families who live nearby.

After arriving and donning play construction hats, girls and their male caregivers started the day with LEGO-building challenges. They constructed towers and vehicles using different shapes and sizes of blocks. They also put together GoldieBlox, which are engineering blocks designed to appeal to girls, creating everything from airplanes to flowers. A few of the dad-daughter duos took a snap circuit kit and worked together to connect electronic circuit pieces to turn on a radio, ring an alarm or launch a helicopter spinner.

Next, while the girls took part in more LEGO-building activities, the male caregivers gathered for a workshop with Wil LaVeist, journalist, author and host of The Wil LaVeist Show on 88.1 WHOV. LaVeist, whose book Dear Daughter was recently published, encouraged the male caregivers to love and stay close to their daughters. LaVeist’s tips for the caregivers included telling their girls that they love them and meaning it, talking with their girls instead of down to them and speaking positively about their girl’s mother.

“Good fathers want their daughters to grow up to be strong women,” LaVeist said.

After enjoying lunch and a dance party together, the girls and their caregivers split into two groups again. While the fathers spent more time learning from LaVeist and one another, the girls painted and decorated pieces of wooden vehicles—cars, ships, trains and airplanes. The day ended with the girls and caregivers pairing back up to construct their vehicles.

“We have collaborated with the Girl Scouts for at least 10 years,” Crystal Rainey, executive director of the C. Waldo Scott Center for Hope said. “This is the first time that our center has been able to host a program for girls and their male role models, and we are pleased to work with the Girl Scouts to make that happen. It is so important to engage girls in STEM and problem-solving activities, and it is great to be able to see them learn and have fun alongside the men who play important roles in their lives.”

According to The State of Girls, a report by the Girl Scout Research Institute, 30 percent of girls ages five to 17 in Virginia live in a single-parent family. Girl Scouts know that families provide girls with critical social, economic and emotional support, which is why the organization provides opportunities for parents and their girls to spend quality time together. Girl Scouts is not just for girls and their moms. Dads, too, can look to Girl Scouts for constructive, adventurous and fun activities to do with their girls. 

Take a Girl Scout to Work at Jefferson Lab

This month, Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast is working with Girl Scout alumnae in a variety of careers to place Girl Scouts in work shadowing positions during Take a Girl Scout to Work Day. Take a Girl Scout to Work Day is modeled after the national Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work® (TODASTW) where each year more than 3.5 million American workplaces open their doors to over 39 million employees and their children on TODASTW Day.

Tatyana, Girl Scout Leader Tamika Butler, Shannon, Rahwa
and Christine Wheeler of Jefferson Lab

On Thursday, April 6, three Peninsula Girl Scouts, Shannon, Tatyana and Rahwa, spent the day at Jefferson Lab, where they met with women working in a variety of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. Shannon, a high school junior who has been a Girl Scout for 11 years, has an interest in pursuing a career in computer science. She has earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor a girl can earn in Girl Scouting, and is a member of the Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast board of directors. In school, she takes advanced science classes and recently placed at the Great Computer Challenge. She attributes much of her interest in STEM to experiences that she has had as a Girl Scout.

Rahwa, who is also a high school junior, has an interested in biology and has considered a career in the medical field. As she learns more about different careers, she is hoping to study biomedical engineering in college. Tatyana is a high school freshman and has a wide range of interests in STEM. By visiting Jefferson Lab and taking part in other activities with Girl Scouts, Tatyana hopes to explore many career options during her next few years in high school.

The day started in the Support Service Center, where Christine Wheeler, a science education administrator, welcomed Girl Scouts to Jefferson Lab by sharing what scientists are studying there and talking about important safety guidelines to follow while visiting.

Mechanical Engineer Celia Whitlatch shows a flow sensor
she designed as part of a new cooling system at Jefferson Lab.

The girls then visited Celia Whitlatch, a mechanical engineer, in her office and learned about what her job is like. Whitlatch was excited to share with the girls that she had been a Girl Scout while growing up in Arizona. She showed the girls photos from a cooling system project that she worked on, displayed sample pieces that she has designed, including a flow sensor, and talked about her role as a supervisor on construction projects. She then talked about the education she needed to obtain her job, and showed the girls some of her college textbooks, which she still references today when working on projects. Whitlatch also shared that she sometimes faces challenges as a woman in a male-dominated career, especially when it comes to managing a construction site.

“I have never had a female mechanical engineer colleague here at Jefferson Lab in the 22 years that I have worked here,” Whitlatch told the girls. “I used to be shy, but being a female engineer has made me more outspoken. Sometimes have to defend my projects and designs.”

Tatyana, Rahwa and Shannon with Health Physicist Maya Keller
in the Radioanalytical Lab at Jefferson Lab.

The girls then walked to the Applied Research Center, where they met with Maya Keller, who is a health physicist working in the radiation control department at Jefferson Lab. Keller showed the girls a training space used to simulate dealing with radioactive materials. She also talked about the responsibilities she has in her job, including training people about safety around radioactive materials, running the radioanalytical lab and managing the dosimetry program, which monitors levels of radioactivity for individuals working at Jefferson Lab. Keller brought the girls into the radioanalytical lab and discussed how technicians use the different types of machines to measure levels of radiation.

Later in the morning, the girls visited the offices of Michele Joyce, a computer scientist, and Fay Hannon, a physicist, to learn about their careers as well. After lunch in the cafeteria at Jefferson Lab, the girls had the chance to take a tour of the campus and learn more about the research projects conducted there.

Take a Girl Scout to Work Day at Jefferson Lab was designed to give teen Girl Scouts the opportunity to learn more about the wide range of careers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. In today’s world, women hold only approximately 25 percent of STEM careers. And, in some STEM fields, women are even more underrepresented than others. According to the American Physical Society, in 2015, less than 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees in physics were earned by women.

Girl Scouts is committed to providing opportunities for girls to explore and discover in a wide variety of STEM fields. Through opportunities, including Take a Girl Scout to Work Day at Jefferson Lab, Girl Scouts is able to introduce girls women in STEM careers, who show girls that they can be whatever they want to be.

Girl Scout Bronze Award Garden

The members of Newport News Girl Scout Troop 1539 are on the mission to make the world a better place, one project at a time. Recently, the girls earned the Girl Scout Bronze Award, the third highest honor a girl can earn in Girl Scouts, for their sustainable gardening project at the Newport News Family YMCA. The YMCA had received a grant from askHRgreen.org to create gardens that the facility’s new spray park, and the girls partnered with a troop member’s older brother, David Wells, who was working on his Eagle Scout project, to make the garden plans a reality.

While Wells worked on designing, building and installing four raised garden beds, Girl Scout Troop 1539 got to work learning about native plants, drought tolerant landscapes and animal habitats with the help of Amy Henry, the health and wellness program director at the YMCA and a Virginia Master Naturalist. The girls studied a variety of plants and learned about their uses. They decided to create a theme for each of the garden beds—sensory, wildflower, edible and butterfly.

Next, some of the troop members visited a local nursery to pick out the plants. When planting day arrived, the girls arranged each bed and learned how to properly plant the greenery. After the beds were planted, the girls made diagrams of each, recording the plant names and types. The diagrams were used to make teaching cards that are now used to explain the characteristics and benefits of the plants to preschoolers and campers at the YMCA. Watering duties have been taken on by the preschoolers at the YMCA, who also pick and enjoy the fruits and vegetables from the garden bed with edible plants.

In addition to earning the Bronze Award for their project, the troop members also earned the Flowers, Gardening and Animal Habitats badges.

The Girl Scout Bronze Award requires girls to make a difference in the community through leadership work. It is the top achievement earned by Girl Scout Juniors—fourth and fifth graders.

Newport News Girl Scout Gives Back to the Military for Silver Award Project

Jazzlyn, a Newport News Girl Scout, has earned the Silver Award, the second highest honor a girl can earn in Girl Scouting. Jazzlyn has been a Girl Scout for four years.

Jazzlyn understands firsthand the sacrifices made by members of the military and their family. Both of her parents are veterans and her mother was deployed to Iraq to care for injured soldiers. For her Silver Award project, Jazzlyn wanted to give back to the military community and decided to create community book exchanges at USO Welcome Center at the Norfolk International Airport and local veterans’ medical centers.

“Reading helps me escape reality and go on an adventure,” Jazzlyn said. “My hope is that it will help the military members do the same so they don’t have to think about bad stuff going on in the world.”

To complete her project, Jazzlyn collected books, CDs and movies that soldiers can borrow for any amount of time to enjoy while they’re traveling or at their destination and return to the book exchange when they come back.

Through the work that she did with her Silver Award project, Jazzlyn also became a Wounded Warriors Student Ambassador. In this role, Jazzlyn helps to raise awareness about the work that the Wounded Warriors Project does to help injured service members recover and readjust.

The Girl Scout Silver Award is the highest award earned by Girl Scouts in middle school. To earn the award, Girl Scouts have to identify an issue in the community and carry out a Take Action Project to address the matter through leadership work.

Girl Scouts Recognized with Volunteer Achievement Awards

This year, Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast is proud to have Girl Scouts selected by a panel of community judges to receive achievement awards from VOLUNTEER Hampton Roads. The recipients are Girl Scout Ambassador Lauren from Newport News and four members of Troop 629 from Chesapeake- Talia, Nicole, Darielle and Alyssa.

Lauren was nominated the project she did to earn the Girl Scout Gold Award, which aimed to reverse the small percentage of minorities and females participating in the fields of aviation and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Read more about her project here. Lauren has also led two other large-scale community service projects. Lauren helped to organize a tutoring program to help local youth pass their standardized tests and she also lead a food drive at her school that resulted in significant food and monetary donations for local food pantries. These two community service projects were funded in part by two separate grants from Disney that Lauren applied for.

The members of Girl Scout Troop 629 were nominated for their Girl Scout Silver Award project. To earn the Silver Award, Talia, Nicole, Darielle and Alyssa taught local citizens about the history of Chesapeake in coordination with the 50th anniversary of the city. Read more about their project here. In addition to this work, the girls in Troop 629 have spent time at Dominion Village Assisted Living Facility in Chesapeake, where they read to the residents, lead games, conduct musical performances and more. The troop also participates in the annual food drive at Deep Creek United Methodist Church and the annual GSCCC Helping Hands Food Drive.

The Hampton Roads VOLUNTEER Achievement Awards, which are conducted annually, recognize the region's most outstanding volunteers based on their length of service, initiative and impact on the community. Lauren, Talia, Nicole, Darielle and Alyssa are being recognized alongside men, women and other youth who have inspiring stories that encourage others to serve.

All of this year's Hampton Roads VOLUNTEER Achievement Award will be honored during a ceremony on Wednesday, April 15 at the Founders Inn and Spa in Virginia Beach. Tickets for this dinner and awards ceremony are $50 each and can be purchased online here.

Two GSCCC Girl Scouts Receive President’s Volunteer Service Award

Girl Scout Senior Katherine from Chesapeake and Girl Scout Ambassador Lauren from Newport News have been honored for their exemplary volunteer service with a President’s Volunteer Service Award.

The award, which recognizes Americans of all ages who have volunteered significant amounts of their time to serve their communities and their country, was granted by The Prudential Spirit of Community Awards program on behalf of President Barack Obama.

Katherine with GSCCC CEO Tracy Keller

Katherine completed a project to address literacy among children. Katherine installed a lending library at the Boys and Girls Club of South Hampton Roads. She refurbished and built two bookcases, added four bean bag chairs to the reading area and collected over 600 books to donate to this lending library, as well as to Chesapeake Kids. She also painted a reading-themed mural to remind kids that reading can take them anywhere. Once her project was complete, Katherine created fliers to get the word out about how the lending library works and hosted a grand opening event where she read to children, helped them make bookmarks and gave each child in attendance a new book to each to take home. For this project, Katherine earned the Girl Scout Silver Award, the second highest honor and award a girl can earn in Girl Scouting.

Katherine has also been on three mission trips to West Virginia to repair homes and build walkways, participates in Relay for Life, has volunteered at summer camp and bible school and has participated in numerous other community service projects, including food drives and trash pickups.

Lauren with Dr. Ashby Kilgore, superintendent
of Newport News Public Schools

Lauren created opportunities for local youth to gain knowledge in the fields of aviation, aerospace and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) by hosting workshops in the community to teach youth about fundamentals of flight, the importance of STEM as a whole and about resources they can use to pursue interests in STEM. Lauren led activities that allowed children to build airplane models, see things fly and learn about aviation history. For this community service project, Lauren earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor and achievement in Girl Scouting.

Lauren has also led two other large-scale community service projects. She helped to organize a tutoring program to local youth pass their standardized tests. She helped plan Saturday tutoring sessions that were held at Denbigh High School, as well as get teachers involved in helping to tutor and provide snacks for the children who attended. For another community service project, Lauren helped organize a food drive at her school and helped to raise over $200 for local food pantries. These projects were funded in part by two separate grants from Disney that Lauren applied for.

The Prudential Spirit of Community Awards, sponsored by Prudential Financial in partnership with the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), recognizes middle level and high school students across America for outstanding volunteer service.

GSCCC Girl Scout Heading to the White House

Girl Scouts will be in full force at the White House on March 23, when President Obama will welcome young scientists and engineers from across the country to showcase their inventions and discoveries at the 2015 White House Science Fair.

This year, Girl Scouts are represented by Lauren, a Girl Scout Gold Award recipient from Newport News, whose project aims to reverse the small percentage of minorities and females participating in the fields of aviation and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Lauren will be joined at the White House Science Fair by a Girl Scout Daisy Troop from Girl Scouts of Eastern Oklahoma who invented a battery-powered page turner for people with arthritis, people who are paralyzed, or “people who have no arms.”

Hosted by President Obama, the fair will feature innovative projects, designs and experiments from students all across America from a broad range of STEM competitions. This year’s fair will also include a specific focus on girls and women who are excelling in STEM and inspiring the next generation with their work.

Lauren, who attends the Denbigh High School Aviation Academy, began her Girl Scout Gold Award project after discovering the small percentage of minorities and females partaking in the fields of aviation and STEM. Prox worked with local scouting troops and youth-serving organizations, developed aviation-themed scavenger hunts that aligned with scouting requirements for patches and made aerospace-centered lesson plans for scouting leaders to use in the future. For older audiences, she gave presentations regarding her STEM experiences, from flying a plane to interning at NASA.

According to the Girl Scout Research Institute study Generation STEM: What Girls Say About Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, 82 percent of girls see themselves as “smart enough to have a career in STEM." However, only 13 percent of girls say that a STEM career is their first choice. Girls are aware that gender barriers persist in today's society. Researchers found that 57 percent of girls studied agree that if they were to pursue a STEM career, they would “have to work harder than a man to be taken seriously.”

View the White House Science Fair live on Monday, March 23 starting at 11:55 a.m. here.

Think Like a Scientist

From learning about constellations in the night sky to discovering the life under the sea, over 400 Girl Scouts learned how to think like a scientist during a special event hosted for Girl Scouts on December 6 at the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News.

A hornet's nest was just one of the many exhibits
Virginia Beach Girl Scouts Sarah and Madison
viewed during Think Like a Scientist

During the event, the girls participated in a variety of activities that taught them about the regions of Virginia and the plants and animals that live there. From the coastal plains to the mountain coves, girls toured a variety of exhibits where they looked at sand and feather samples under a microscope, explored types of butterflies native to the region and discovered the rich biological history of the commonwealth.

They also visited an exhibit that taught them about a career in veterinary medicine, watched honeybees hard at work in the hive at the museum, saw the water cycle in action and learned about scientific principles, including gravity, pressure and force.

While at the Virginia Living Museum, girls also had the opportunity to visit the Abbitt Planetarium where they learned about planets, stars, black holes and studying Earth from space. They also saw a moon rock sample on exhibit from NASA and participated in an “instant snow demonstration” to teach them about energy levels and chemical reactions.

This event was designed to show girls that no matter their interests, there are activities and careers in the sciences for them. Today, women hold only about 25 percent of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. Girl Scouts are working with community partners such as the Virginia Living Museum to fill the gap by giving girls the chance to participate in a wide variety of STEM activities. This event was a fun and informal way for girls to gain insight into the world of science while cultivating their problem solving, teamwork and leadership skills.

Girl Scout Junior Ivanna from Norfolk viewed a feather under a
microscope in the biology workshop at Think Like a Scientist.

The next Girl Scout STEM event, Cosmic Cuisine and Galaxy Grub, will take place on Friday, February 13 from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton. This event is open to all girls, whether or not they are currently registered members of Girl Scouts. For more information, visit www.gsccc.org.

Girl Scout Earns Silver Award for Art Education Project

Nina sorts through donated crayons
for her Silver Award project.

Girl Scout Senior Nina from Newport News has earned the Silver Award, the second highest award a girl can earn in Girl Scouting, for her project that focused on art education for young children.

For her project, Nina taught art classes to children at PORT Emergency Homeless Shelter and Downtown Hampton Child Development Center. During the classes that she taught to over 100 children, Nina gave each child a drawing book she had made with easy steps to guide the children to draw animals. She also presented the children with crayons she had made from melting down used crayons, as well as a small pack of new crayons.

Nina also packaged her drawing books and crayons and gave them out to four preschools and childhood development centers on the Peninsula. She included an instructional guide for teaching the classes she designed with each packet so that her project can be delivered to even more children.

“I chose my project because I wanted to teach younger children and those less fortunate about the basic drawing shapes and give them the ability to express themselves through art,” Nina said.

Nina hopes that her project made an impact on encouraging young children to use their imagination. She chose to present her art classes to at-risk youth in order to give them an opportunity to learn about expressing themselves through art, as well as method to help relieve stress.

The Girl Scout Silver Award requires girls to identify an issue in their community and carry out a Take Action project to address the matter through leadership work. The Girl Scout Silver Award is the second- highest a girl can earn in Girl Scouting.

Gold Award Spotlight: Reaching New Altitudes

Girl Scout Ambassador Lauren from Newport News recently earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, which is the highest honor and achievement in Girl Scouting. For her project, Lauren wanted to create an opportunity for local youth to gain knowledge in the fields of aviation, aerospace and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).

She created lesson plans to teach children in local community groups about the fundamentals of flight, the importance of STEM as a whole and about resources they can use to pursue interests in STEM, including local museums, events and summer camps. Lauren led activities that allowed children to build airplane models, see things fly and learn about aviation history.

Lauren chose this project because she recognizes a trend in education that focuses on children passing standardized tests, rather than encouraging children to pursue innovative thoughts and be challenged in the fields that interest them. By creating opportunities for children to be engaged in STEM activities, Lauren gave the children that she worked with experience, education and intrigue in the STEM fields.

“As a military child, I’ve always liked aviation,” Lauren said. “My teachings will lay a foundation for youth to build on their understanding of aviation and the role it plays in their everyday lives.”

The Gold Award requires girls to identify an issue in their community and carry out a Take Action project to address the matter through leadership work. Nationwide, less than 6 percent of eligible Girl Scouts earn the Gold Award, which adds Lauren to an elite group of female leaders across the country with the honor.