20 October 2008
GSUSA: Recruiting the Fair
Posted by admin under: community service .
This weekend our Girl Scout troop took a step out of our normal area and helped our state assemblyman put on a family resource fair along with a couple hundred of our neighbors. One of his assistants works in our neighborhood council, one of those political concoctions particular to Los Angeles, and since we were on the agenda to present our girls’ activities to the council (a little PR never hurt anybody) Yolanda asked if we’d be willing to go the fair and do face painting for the kids so that their parents could wander around and get information from the various exhibits. The date fit in our calendar so we said yes.
One of our moms found these water-activated face-paints that come in a pencil. I’ve done face-painting with the traditional grease paints which always smear very easily and I can definitely recommend these pencils. I’ll have to update the post later with the actual brand name. They’re great. You can sharpen the pencil so you can draw thin lines or you can make them broad. You have to constantly dip the pencils in water, but they are easy to draw with.
I’m kind of a clown at public events. I was dancing around to the music and doing my best carnival barker imitation to bring the parents and kids over. There was a representative from the Girl Scout service unit that draws from the area the park was in and I referred over the parents to give their information to join a troop. My daughter had her dance class so we had to depart early, but we caught the last 45 minutes of the event when we returned and I must have talked to an easy dozen families about joining Girl Scouts in the just under 2 hours we were there. That happened to other girls, too, where they could only work part of the day, but we just rotated girls into stations.
Our girls really enjoyed face painting and the little kids loved getting rainbows, snakes, skulls, lightning bolts and assorted easily drawn designs on their faces and arms. We saw some other kids from school and harangued them to join Scouting and stop avoiding it for goodness sake. Hm. No takers there, but they got their faces painted anyway.
In all, it was a great way for the girls to have fun and do some easy recruitment. Too bad it wasn’t in our district. We could have gotten a lot of girls placed if it was since my wife helps run our service unit. The weather was nice, the people were friendly, and I got to do my Pee-Wee Herman dance when the middle school jazz band played “Tequila”. Oh, yeah, we even got a certificate of thanks from the state legislature. Good times.
- GSUSA: Time in a Bottle
- Face Painting a Rash Decision
- GSUSA and BSA Joint Recruitment
- I Love the Sound of this Recruitment
- BSA: Parent Meeting with Few Parents
