Atlanta Girl Scouts Chosen to Pilot Environmental Community Action Project

The Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta have been chosen to be one of 30 Girl Scout organizations to lead Girl Scouts of the USA's Community Action Project: Forever Green. Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta was selected for the education program they are creating during the construction of their new Girl Scout Service and Business Centers in Cobb County. The Business Center is hoping to receive a Silver LEED Certification and the pre-existing building that will house the Service Center has been remodeled with green materials. The organization has also created a "Green Team" to develop green programming for the new facilities, including an Environmental Patch for scouts to and a podcast virtual tour of the new buildings to feature information about the green methods used in their construction. The program will be monitored by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Forever Green is designed to encourage Girl Scouts to use their skills to help the environment by working with schools and communities to improve air quality, energy use, water use, waste management and use of green space.

Atlanta Girl Scouts Go Green

Seventy Girl Scouts from Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta, Inc. gathered at Camp Pine Acres to work on various patches aimed at outdoor education during the Cadette Outdoor Interest Project Trek. With the direction of Erthnxt’s: One Planet, One Future: Trees for the 21st Century, 50 long leaf pine saplings were planted across the campgrounds.

Erthnxt has a mission of planting one billion trees worldwide. Their program, Trees for the 21st Century, is a tree-planting program for children ages six to 18, involving science-based learning, tree-planting and ongoing stewardship activities. This was a natural fit to go along with the council’s Outdoor Interest Project Trek which encouraged the girls to earn patches such as Eco-Action, All About Birds and Wildlife.

“When I learned about the program I thought it would be a good opportunity for the girls to learn more about the environment,” Camp Pine Acres camp director, Erin Steill, said about how the Girl Scouts became involved. “They learned what they can do to make a difference in their own neighborhoods and how to educate other people about the benefits of environmentalism.”

“We learned that people need to take better care of our trees,” says 12-year-old Girl Scout Cadette, Taylor, one of the girls who participated in the Outdoor Interest Project. “If we keep cutting down trees to build than our planet will be sickly looking and start to rot.”

Along with planting trees, the girls learned about the benefits trees provide us and what can harm trees, a subject that hits close to home for Camp Pine Acres. In the late 1990’s, the camp was almost devastated by pine bark beetles, a natural predator to the pine trees located at the camp. In order to save the healthy trees, all infected trees and any that stood within 10-feet of them had to be removed.

“Planting the pine trees at Camp Pine Acres will help with erosion and replenish the trees that were destroyed due to the pine bark beetles,” Erin said. “The growth of the long leaf pine trees will also provide shade and shelter to the once open area for deer and other animals on the property as well as the campers!”

For more information: www.girlscoutsofgreateratlanta.org

Park Pride Marks National Public Lands Day

Park Pride celebrated National Public Lands Day Saturday, Sept. 27, by partnering with corporations and several of its community-based Friends of the Park groups and conducting volunteer work days in several Atlanta parks.

National Public Lands Day is the nation's largest hands-on volunteer effort to improve America's public lands—begun in 1994 with three federal agencies and 700 volunteers. More than 120,000 volunteers lent a hand at more than 1,600 locations in every state of the nation.

UPS was the first partner to support Park Pride’s National Public Lands Day efforts. Volunteers from UPS worked with community leaders to rehabilitate the playground and clear underbrush in Adams Park in southwest Atlanta.

Elsewhere, Girl Scouts Troops, Friends of Collier Heights Park and GA Tech Team Buzz volunteered at parks around Atlanta, including Gilliam Park in Kirkwood, Spink Collins Park in northwest Atlanta and northwest Atlanta park cleaning up the parks and planting flowers.

“National Public Lands Day lets us honor the tremendous legacy that earlier generations have given us,” said Park Pride Executive Director George Dusenbury. “We also recognize the need to build upon their legacy by volunteering in our parks and working to create more parks. No major city has a smaller percent of its land dedicated to parks than does Atlanta.”

Park Pride invites other community, corporate or civic organizations to celebrate our public lands while working to create more and better parks all over Atlanta. Contact Ayanna Williams at (404) 917-7963 or Ayanna@parkpride.org to learn how you can help improve the public legacy that we leave our children and future generations.

Park Pride, founded in 1989, is the only organization that works with communities all over Atlanta to improve their parks. In 2007, Park Pride coordinated more than 20,000 hours of volunteer work in Atlanta parks, developed new conceptual park plans for seven parks and helped start more than a dozen “Friends of the Park” groups. Park Pride is able to engage and serve the community by generating Friends of the Park groups, focusing on advocacy efforts as well as promoting participation in its Adopt-a-Park, Park Visioning, Volunteer, Fiscal Partners and Micro Grant programs. 

Park Pride continues to work with local organizations and community members to support the creation of the BeltLine, which promises to create more than 1,000 acres of new parks and 33 miles of trails. For more information on Park Pride please visit www.parkpride.org