Three Mount Vernon area Girl Scouts received their Bronze Award for designing a badge and program around preparedness for future derechos.
Aida Jones, Evelyn Klima and Sofia Osmun completed their Bronze Award earlier this spring. The Bronze Award is the highest award a Junior Girl Scout can earn. All three scouts just completed fifth grade.
According to Dianne Osmun, troop leader, the girls began discussing their Bronze Award just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. All three girls were also impacted by the Aug. 10 derecho.
“When we started back for our scout year, they pretty quickly narrowed down and focused on wanting to do something related to the derecho,” Osmun said.
Osmun and her family were in Texas in 2017 for the graduation of her oldest daughter, Rachel, from the University of Texas Medical in Galveston. This was shortly before Hurricane Harvey’s landfall.
Osmun returned to Iowa and discussed the issue with her troop (then Brownie Scouts), about potentially helping those impacted by the hurricane. They all did, completing a patch from the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas for hurricane relief and helping to raise funds for those impacted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The girls also completed badges in First Aid and the Safety Award at that time.
“When they began talking about doing their Bronze Award and connecting it to the derecho, they wanted to help people,” Osmun said. “They wanted something that would be long term. We looked back over what they had done in the past. I reminded them of the Hurricane Harvey patch. It did not take them long to decide that they wanted to do something similar only focused on derechos.”
The Scouts were working on their projects in virtual meetings at the time, as the COVID-19 pandemic was still ongoing.
“All their communication and decision making were done through Zoom meetings and email,” Osmun said. “They actually worked through putting the steps of the patch together very quickly. They had the Hurricane Harvey patch and other council patch programs about hurricanes and natural disasters as examples to help them design their own. They agreed very early on what needed to be included.”
There were lags in designing the patch, gathering additional information and finding a sponsor for the patches.
Osmun said their clarity and focus on what items they wanted tackled for the patch presented them with some minor difficulties. The Bronze Award requires each Girl Scout puts in 20 hours of work to earn the award, and having a clear focus on the patch meant they needed to take more time in developing the patch with additional resources.
“This is how they got to the point of interviewing the Mount Vernon city administrator, Chris Nosbisch,” Osmun said. “Their interview with him did help them to expand their focus about what was involved in the cleanup process following a storm.”
Osmun was extremely impressed by the insightful questions the girls put together for their interview with Nosbisch.
They did the legwork to help find a sponsor for their patches in the program. Osmun said because meetings were held virtually and so much work happened outside of the meeting times, it was harder to gauge how much time the girls spent individually on the project.
“We did our best guess and made sure they each had at least 20 hours of work towards developing the patch,” Osmun said.
When it came to what they learned, Osmun said that the trio enjoyed discussing the derecho with Nosbisch, as it gave a more detailed look into the clean-up following the storm and how many people were involved in the process.
The girls also learned about the importance of the work of arborists after a severe emergency.
“The City of Mount Vernon called in an arborist right away to assess tree damage,” Osmun said. “Because of that decision, Mount Vernon was able to save many trees that other communities would have simply cut down.”
The girls started work on the Bronze Award in early September 2020, and submitted it for approval in March 2021. It probably would have taken less time in a normal year, Osmun said.
Girl Scouts who participate in the Derecho Preparedness and Response patch will have skills that can be applied to preparation for other natural disasters and emergency events as well.
Osmun noted that because of the work of the scouts beginning back when they were Brownies, they were better set up for developing their own Bronze Award winning patch.
“This project really began when they were Brownies, when they made the decision to help people they didn’t know in another state,” Osmun said. “The knowledge and experience they gained then contributed to their decision to create the derecho patch program and the information that they chose to include in their patch. I describe it as a serendipitous journey.”
Sofia Osmun is one of three Girl Scouts who earned their Bronze Award for developing a badge about derecho preparedness.