100th Anniversary - Guest Blog: Bruner

Ronette Bruner, a Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa Girl Scout Ambassador is our guest blogger this week.  Thank you for your contribution to your community and your loyalty to Girl Scouts!  

If you'd like to be our next blogger, please email us and tell us your story!

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Ronette Bruner
Girl Scout Ambassador
Gold Award Recipient

Hello my name is Ronette Bruner. I am in 11th grade this year. I have many favorite subjects, but the two that I love the most are history and anatomy. Three of my favorite activities are show choir, reading, and learning. I have been in Girl Scouts for almost 12 years and I am now a Girl Scout Ambassador.  

I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, and responsible for what I say and do, respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout. I have just quoted the Girl Scout Law and I try to practice this on a daily basis.  

I learned this as a Girl Scout Brownie, while making my sit-upon.  My goal was to do my best.  To be honest and fair I took on the role of President in my Girl Scout troop. There have been many opportunities to be friendly and helpful. One time a little girl showed up at a Girl Scout function without a parent/guardian. I took on the responsibility of finding her mother; while we waited for her mother to come I took her around to different activities to keep her busy. I have taken on the responsibility of being a delegate for the Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa. I have learned that what I say can have a great effect on everybody.  

I feel I have gained great confidence by attending events and programs provided by Girl Scouts. I have attended many Earth Day events. I have collected trash and recycled different items.  When I work on projects I try to not waste resources if possible. I have met many girls through Girl Scouting and have made many friends. I have met adults as well as peers through the community, while being in a worth-while organization like Girl Scouts. I feel Girl Scouts has molded my character into the responsible leader of today.  

I have attended many thinking day events where troops come from all over and present different countries so girls learn how it is to live somewhere else. I have attended baseball games, water parks, camps, classes on respecting yourself and others, program aids, leadership, CPR and first aid. I even helped organize a trip to an Alaska encampment. I helped organize the trip for 16 girls to go to the encampment to join other Girl Scouts from all over the world like: Hawaii, Russia, and even Japan.  

While in Girl Scouts I have worked on and completed all of the highest awards in Girl Scouting. For the bronze award my troop painted a head start playground. For the Silver Award me and another Girl Scout decorated 4x8 sheets of plywood, insulated them, and hung them in a church to sound proof the gym. For my Gold Award, the highest award a Girl Scout can earn, I offered a reading program to a primary school. I started this project because I like to read and want younger children to want to read. If I could get even one child to read, it would make the world a better place.  

The best thing about being a Girl Scout is being able to do things you never thought possible. Girl Scouting has helped me develop character by putting me in different positions which has helped me take on many different roles in different fields that I normally would not have tried. This has given me the opportunity to become a stronger person and help me develop into a morally strong young adult.


- Ronette Bruner

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100th Anniversary - Guest Blog: Graves

Valerie Graves, Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa's CES (Member Database) Manager has blogged for us this week.  Valerie is celebrating her 25th year of being involved with Girl Scouts and has a wealth of knowledge and a passion about the importance of our program.  Thank you Valerie for your your continued contribution and love for Girl Scouting.

If you would like to be our next guest blogger, please email us and let us know! 

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Valerie Graves
Girl Scout Lifetime Member
CES Manager
Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa

You never know how much little girls can touch your heart and cause your hands to move a generation. Well, seven little girls touched my heart in 1988 in Huntsville, Alabama. When my daughter’s Girl Scout troop leader left the troop with three weeks left in the school year. The other moms and I met and decided that three of us would take a week and finish the year. We searched through the girl’s handbook and badge book and found badges we wanted them to earn.

Little did I know that my week as a “leader” would change my life forever. I not only enjoyed planning and delivering “program” to the girls, but went further and enrolled in the leader training over the summer and when the school year began; I became a leader of my first troop. I will never forget the joy I felt having my seven girls so excited about Girl Scouting, and the moms and dads were too. 

Girl Scout’s motto over the years has been to develop girls into leaders – well, Girl Scouts made a leader out of me. Girl Scouts moved me out of my quiet shell and gave me the courage to lead not just girls, but adults too. When I moved back to Atlanta, Georgia in 1994, I didn’t just leave my girls, but my adults too. In six years, I had gone from being a mom of a Girl Scout to a leader of a multi-level troop that included girls in every level (Daisy, Brownie, Junior, Cadette, and Senior), a service unit director, an apprentice trainer, and a CPR trainer. My blood was truly bleeding “green”. I joined the council in Atlanta and became an experienced trainer while continuing as a leader. My first job in Atlanta was as a customer service rep in the council’s Girl Scout store. There I continued to help leaders develop their skills as well as helping the staff to develop their computer skills. The store manager gave me the okay to change their antiquated system (the old cash registers where the numbers printed as you pressed a key) to a network system of 3 computer registers connected to the back office server. Talk about courage – wow! That took guts. But thanks to Girl Scouts, I had the confidence that I would succeed and the council store would be able to serve their customers better. As it turned out – they became the number one Girl Scout store grossing more sales than any other Girl Scout store.
 
I later became the Director of Information Technology and took my computer skills and applied them to every department in the council – keeping the “girls” in the forefront of everything I did. I didn’t just work at Girl Scouts – I was an advocate for Girl Scouts. On the weekends I would wear (and still do) Girl Scout t-shirts and sweat shirts, knowing that someone would stop me and say, “I was a Girl Scout when I was a girl.” And my reply would be, “But you can still be a Girl Scout now. You can register as an adult and help us to continue to develop our girls into leaders”. I would carry my business cards with me and as I recruited new potential leaders, I would write the membership staff name and phone number on the back of the card and tell them if they did not get a call back in a few days, to call me.
 
When the Atlanta council re-organized the staff and removed my department, I asked God to allow me to continue my journey in Girl Scouts and help me find a council where I could use my technology skills and my heart for Girl Scouts. When I saw the job description for the database position at Greater Iowa – I knew that was where I wanted to be. I had never been to Iowa nor did I know anyone who had lived there. But I felt a spirit there and it rang louder as I interviewed. The excitement in the staff’s voice when I accepted the position told me that I had found a new Girl Scout home.
 
As we celebrate Girl Scouts’ 100th birthday (my 25th birthday as a Girl Scout), I challenge the staff, and the volunteers to listen to your heart and feel the words of Juliette Gordon Low; "I've got something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and we're going to start it tonight!" You can make a difference if you feel in your heart that Girl Scouts is the place where girls develop into strong leaders. The one piece of the Girl Scout Law I always use in every situation is “using my resources wisely” and adults – you are the resource that can help our girls to become great leaders.

- Valerie Graves

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100th Anniversary - Guest Blog: Schettler

Thanks to Christy Schettler for blogging for us this week.  Christy is one of our valued volunteers who leads a multi-level Girl Scout Troop from Breda, IA. 

If you are interested in being our next guest blogger, please email us your story! 

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Christy Schettler
Breda Girl Scouts Troop 273

Hi! My name is Christy Schettler and I have been a Girl Scout for as long as I can remember.  When I was a young Girl Scout, my leader was Miss Kitty (Taylor) and she was awesome!

I am now the proud mom of 25 girls (give or take) twice a month! Yes, I have one large Girl Scout troop (or group is how we should be defined since we range in age from 5-17). My troop leadership journey started out over ten years ago as this small idea... "I should just lead my own troop instead of driving my girls 15 miles to meet twice a month, I know 5 girls that will join right in town". Well the first meeting there were 10 smiling faces (okay 4 were crying but you know what I mean) and from then until now, Breda Girl Scout Troop #10273 has probably had 50 members. We have had members graduate high school, move away, and just have too busy of schedules. But we have been blessed to have the original members still in the troop and they are all now in high school.

I am honored to be a Girl Scout Leader and watch these young girls become young women. They are now excelling in so many avenues - sports, school plays, state competitions, National Honor Society, and I hope Girl Scouts played a small role in the girls becoming so confident and successful.

We are blessed to be in a small town and are able to volunteer on a regular basis. We meet Sept. - May each year with five or six large volunteer projects a year: Adopt a family, food drive, Earth day, Fall Festival, 4th of July, and many others. We helped serve the Honor flight for Veterans before they flew to Washington DC for the day and were amazed by their stories.

We also have a little fun, with some of favorites being: skating, lock-ins, Adventureland, camping, sledding, and Thinking Day. Our high school girls will be celebrating Girl Scouts 100th birthday with a trip to Savannah, GA in June.

Look us up on Facebook - Breda Girl Scouts Troop 273

- Christy Schettler

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100th Anniversary - Guest Blog: Stumme

This week we are featuring a former troop leader and a lifetime member of Girl Scouts, whose passion for Scouting began when she was just a young Brownie!  We want to thank Maggie Stumme for sharing three of her most memorable stories from her Girl Scout experience!

If you would like to be a guest blogger for Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa, please email us!

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Maggie Stumme
Former Girl Scout Leader
Lifetime Member

As an Army brat, not a lot was consistent in my childhood.  We moved a lot, about every three years, all over Germany and Europe.  The one thing that was consistent and most memorable was Girl Scouts.  Every Army Post we moved to had Girl Scouts.  I was a Girl Scout Brownie through Cadette, until we moved to an Army Post in the U.S. in southern Arizona and the closest Girl Scout troop was 70 miles away.  It was the one thing I could always look forward to whenever we moved.   

When I was a Girl Scout Brownie, one of the girls in my troop became sick.  We didn’t really understand at the time what cancer was and why she couldn’t come to all of the troop meetings or why her hair was falling out.  But we were excited when our friend was there and we missed her when she wasn’t.  I will always remember the day our troop leader told us that she would not be coming to our meetings anymore.  She was too sick.  A short while after that, she passed away.  It was the first time in my life that I had experienced the loss of a friend in that way.  We had moved away from friends, but never lost one forever.   But much later, looking back at that experience, I could see how amazing our troop leader had handled it.   With a small group of little girls in their Brownie smocks and knee high socks with orange tabs, she took us out into the woods and we stood in a circle and we talked about our friend we lost.  Then we made little rafts from twigs, put candles on them, and sent them down the stream in the woods and sang Taps.    We didn’t talk all the way back to the road and into our cars.  As an adult leader, I learned about ‘Scouts Own Ceremonies’ and how important that ceremony can be, and I am glad our leader understood that for us as little Brownies. 

When I was a young mother, I was so excited when my Kindergarten daughter brought home the flyer about Girl Scouts and a new program at the time (23 years ago) called Girl Scout Daisies.  I signed up to be the leader of the troop and could not wait to begin.  I found out there were no other parents that wanted to help in our area with the troop, so I recruited my Grandmother to be my co-leader.    She was a little reluctant at first, but really got into as we got started.  All the little girls called her Nana, just like my daughter and we had an amazing year.  We had each girl’s parent volunteer to help a week at a time. During that year, the girls earned their promise center and all their Daisy petals.  My grandma tried very hard to teach them to knit.  She taught me to knit at the age of five, so she was convinced that she could teach eight little girls to knit with my help.  It was a lot of fun trying.  We took them on trips around town and made more crafts than I can remember.  The elementary school was wonderful and let us meet there every Tuesday evening.  When those little girls bridged to Brownies, I don’t think I have ever seen bigger smiles on the girls or the parents, or my Grandmother.   I went on to nineteen more years as a leader with three more daughters, a community coordinator, a day camp director, and council trainer.  My husband even got me a lifetime membership as a Christmas present twelve years ago. 

My family lived in Juneau, Alaska for eight years.  During that time I had the pleasure of directing Girl Scout Day Camp for a few years. My favorite two years were out at the Methodist Camp.  This was out of town a little ways.  It is a beautiful camp in the woods.  There is one main lodge and several smaller cabin areas, a large field in the center and a lot of trails.  It rains a lot in Juneau, so with planning day camp, you need to be flexible in planning indoor and outdoor activities that can be done rain or shine.  One of the years,  about ten years ago, when American Girl Dolls were the big rage for girls, I was trying to figure out a way to plan Girl Scout activities and work with what they were really excited about into a camp experience.  My theme ended up being, “Girls Through American History.”  I researched what girls were doing all through American history, throughout Alaska and throughout the entire country, and planned crafts and activities and games all based on that theme.  The day camp committee and I found volunteers from all over town to come out for different activities and crafts from Native crafts to making and flying our own kites.  My personal favorite activity was my assigned craft and game.  I had the girls make juggling balls from balloons, filling them with dried lentils and then taught them to juggle.  I had to work for four straight weeks ahead of time to teach myself to juggle first.  I drove everyone I knew crazy with my juggling balls and instruction book, trying to teach myself to juggle for this activity.  I did manage the basic skills and can still juggle ten years later.  The girls had a great time that entire week with every activity, even in the rain.  

I know that day camps throughout the country have similar experiences, but I am not sure that many of them start day camp out with bear safety training like we did.  Stay in a group, sing songs so you are loud, if you see a bear, go the other way and let the adults in the cabins know… Remember, the bears are more afraid of you than you are of them.

- Maggie Stumme 

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