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Congratulations on your achievements in Girl Scouting and being ready to tackle the Silver Award!

Your Silver Award project is supposed to benefit your local community. One of the first things you need to do is explore your community to see where the needs are and how a project you can complete can make a difference. Look around you--every community is different in its needs. Once you've identified the needs, you can work with your troop leader to develop ideas for doing something about the needs. Once you've developed ideas, you can form a plan for your project. Remember, you'll have a team to help you and you can enlist and organize any number of other helpers.

For example, if your community has a cold winter or even cold days in the winter and it also has homeless people, perhaps you could organize scouts, their families, and others in the community to provide blankets or to knit scarves, hats, mittens, and socks for the homeless. If there's a shelter program in your town, the shelter director can help to pinpoint the needs of the homeless in your area. (Where I live, there are homeless adults who live under bridges on a permanent basis as well as families that are temporarily homeless, and we have maybe two to three weeks of below-freezing temperature per year maximum. Several groups knit scarves and hats for homeless because they were organized to do so by one person who saw a need.)

For example, if your community has need for a literacy program, perhaps you could organize an effort to have people who have books they don't want to keep donate them to the literacy program. Organize drop-off points around the community and pick up the contributed books and deliver them to the literacy volunteers.

For example, if in your area, some children can't afford shoes to wear to school in the winter, you could organize a drive to provide shoes or maybe "Crocs and socks" for one grade level of one elementary school.

For example, prepare "care bags" for the domestic violence program participants or shelter residents, if there is a shelter. Organize an effort to make small bags--sewn, crocheted, knitted--and fill them with small things. The toiletries that motels put out, the "travel size" toiletries available for $1 or less in pharmacies, note pads and pens, tiny stuffed toys for kids, toothbrushes and toothpaste, hair clips, combs and brushes, and so on. Distribute once or on a regular basis, as you desire.

If your community has a pregnancy counseling agency, you may want to work with the agency to determine if they need basic clothing to send home with newborns. You could set yourself a goal of a certain number of items to donate or organize several others to help you meet a goal of items to donate. Items can be knit, crocheted, or sewn, and you might take the opportunity to learn a new craft or expand your skill in one you already know--or maybe teach the skill to younger scouts. An index of appropriate patterns can be found at Bev's Country Cottage (http://www.bevscountrycottage.com/baby.html ).

Is there a historic location in your vicinity that has been neglected? You can organize a cleanup project. Three Boy Scouts of my acquaintance located the overgrown grave of an early governor of this state, cleaned it up, and lobbied with the state government to have it declared a historic location so that the state has taken over the care, built a wall around it, put up a marker, and made it a tiny park. That was their Eagle Scout project, which I realize is at a higher level of endeavor than a Silver Award. Still, you might be able to identify a location that has been left to deteriorate because people have forgotten about it, lead a campaign to refurbish it, and persuade the city, county, or state to keep it in good condition for the future.

Remember, you can take an idea and improve on it: If you knit a blanket for a homeless person, you might use 50 hours doing it and keep one person warm. If you organize 10 other people to knit one scarf, blanket, pair of socks, or hat each and then you collect and distribute them, you'll invest less than 50 hours and keep at least 10 people warm. Organize 100 people, and you've used your 50 hours and kept 100 people warm.