Fanwood-Scotch Plains Girl Scouts Volunteer at Homefirst

Girl Scouts from Troop 40707 of the Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey, Fanwood-Scotch Plains community have completed their Silver Service Award Projects. The Silver Award, the highest award a Cadette Girl Scout can earn, must be completed by the beginning of 9th grade and each individual scout must put in a minimum of 50 hours of service on a project that their group chooses to meet a need in their community. 

After looking into different programs and services, the girls unanimously chose to donate their time towards families in need at Homefirst. Located in Plainfield, Homefirst is an organization that is dedicated to improving the quality of life for the homeless and other needy families.

The troop created two groups to address different needs of the younger children of Homefirst.

A Tutoring/Educational Games Program was created by one group of four scouts and an Arts and Crafts Enrichment Program was created by a second group of three scouts. The scouts were each assigned one child to work with individually every other Friday from January 2013 to June 2013.  The services were provided in separate rooms at the Homefirst location in Plainfield.

Members of the tutoring program addressed the children’s academic and educational needs, by tutoring and playing educational games with their assigned child. The scouts in the Arts and Crafts Program helped the children assigned to them explore their creativity and improve their fine motors skills by creating  and working on crafts. The wonderful part of both service projects is that the scouts got to form close bonds with the children. They also observed the progression and growth of the individual child they were assigned to over the course of five months. The girls served as role models to the children of Homefirst.

Fanwood-Scotch Plains is one of 138 communities in Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey, which serves over 25,000 girls and 11,000 adult members in 7 counties across central New Jersey. For more information, call (908) 518-4400 or go to http://www.gshnj.org.