It is no secret that I hate the new award requirements; however, my girls are stuck with them, so I'm trying to make lemonade out of lemons. Here's a somewhat edited letter that I sent to my girls/parents after attending a Silver Award training that was comprised of reading the new guidelines out loud over the period of an hour and a half.
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To complete the Silver Award, girls must complete the Amaze Journey and a Silver project according to the following:

AMAZE
To complete the Amaze Journey, a girl must participate in approximately 10 hours of relational awareness/self-esteem workshops, attend the Silver Sleepover, and participate in a "Take Action" project (no minimum number of hours required for the project).

She may do her 10 hours through the following activities:

* Attending the troop SHE workshop in January (2 hours)
* Attending the SHE workshop in September (6 hours)
* Attending Uniquely Me in November or February (3 hours)
* Substitutions completely acceptable subject to approval through Diana/ one possibility is to actually buy the Amaze Journey and do the workbook on your own.

(I actually did not come up with 10 hours arbitrarily; the actual Journey is intended to be completed over a series of meetings, and I calculate if we did it via the book, that's the amount of time it would take us to complete it the "book way." I imagine eight to ten "Journey" meetings focused on relational aggression and self-esteem would drive each and every girl out of the troop though, so we aren't doing that!

We are fortunate that we have a school counselor who works specifically with relational aggression and girls. Her program is called SHE for Sharing Healthy Experiences (see link). We had a private work shop with her last January and attended a large-scale event she organizes each year.)

To finish the Journey, girls must attend the Silver Sleepover to complete the "Discover" and "Connect" portions of the Journey and discuss/implement a "Take Action" project.

SILVER PROJECT
To complete a Silver project, a girl may work by herself or within a group of no more than four girls to complete any project of their choosing that helps make the world a better place. The recommended number of hours is 50, and projects must be completed before girls enter ninth grade.

I will widen the hours requirement to anywhere between 40-50 hours, since it took on of my girls roughly ten seconds to notice that the hours were "recommended" and not "required." I think it's a mistake on GSUSA to "recommend" hours because there surely will be girls who do ten hours and call it done, but that will not happen in my troop.

To receive a Silver Award, a girl need only gain my approval for her project and her activities. Each girl should keep a log of hours with dates and activities documented. An Excel sheet for that purpose is attached. Girls who attended training tonight should start their log with 1.5 hours. I recommend that girls who are ready to start work on a project have a meeting with me to discuss their plan (pre-approval, in other words).

The only other "catch" is that there must be a sustainability aspect to the project. I can have a conversation with each of you about my private and quite strong feelings about this requirement.... for my girls, in this troop, sustainability can be attained by providing me with a plan for their project to continue.

I will make the observation that any improvement type of project, such as helping to finance and install a piece of playground equipment, is automatically going to have a "life," making those projects "more desirable" (sustainable). However, I suspect many of the girls will want to work within their passions (horses, gymnastics, art, animals, religion....). I would prefer they do the latter, and we'll figure out the sustainability portion secondarily.

I know you all know me well enough to know that I am making decisions to best serve our girls to make this a meaningful process. I am altering requirements that I firmly believe are unworkable for us and replacing them with "in kind" activities. If anyone wants to discuss how and why I made the choices I did, I'm happy to do so... I suspect you're all just happy to have "a plan" that you can follow and that the girls will not hate too much ;)