Dear Girl Scouts of Western WA,
My name is Sydney and I am a Junior Girl Scout. I also help run my sister’s Brownie meetings. This month, her meeting’s badge was Philanthropy. We had Elizabeth Ralston, who is a writer for ParentMap and has a well-known philanthropy blog, come to the meeting. She gave a talk about philanthropy and had the Brownies do fun activities to learn more about it.
Some things we learned was the difference between wanting something and needing something, the root words inside of the word philanthropy (phil = love, anthrop = mankind), and what people can do to be philanthropists, such as random acts of kindness. We also created dog toys to donate to the Humane Society and listed kind things that we had done, had been done to us, or we could do. The main thing that we learned at the meeting was this: when we think of philanthropists, we think of Bill Gates and other people who have a lot of money to use towards helping others. However, you do not have to have a lot of money to be a philanthropist, or give any money to others either. You only need to take the time to help other people in order to be one.
After the Girl Scout meeting, the Philanthropy badges were handed out. That’s when I noticed that the badges were green with dollar signs on them. As I said above, we had learned that philanthropy means “love of mankind” and that you don’t have to be wealthy to be philanthropists. I think the badge was saying that, yes, philanthropy does have to do with money. Could you change the Philanthropy badge to represent helping people instead of money? You could replace dollar signs with hearts, maybe, or pictures of people doing random acts of kindness.
Thank you for listening to my suggestions.
Sincerely,
Sydney V., Junior Girl Scout
