“Girl Scouts Leave a Place Better Than They Found It!”

When Dr. Wilson-Oyelaran spoke those words October 4th at the Groundbreaking ceremony on the campus of the new Girl Scouts Program and Training Center, she was expressing one of the fundamental lessons of Girl Scouting.  The new facility at the corner of Maple Street and Crosstown Parkway will welcome visitors from all around the world to a space that will show what girls are capable of achieving with the inspired leadership Girl Scouting provides.  A basic tenet of that leadership promise is teaching stewardship of the environment around us. 

The 4.6 acre campus in downtown Kalamazoo, and the adjacent headwaters of the Axtell Creek watershed, will serve as an exciting, consistent reminder of the respect needed for the environment, especially in an urban setting.  The Girl Scout staff, troop leaders and, most importantly, young Girl Scouts have participated in hundreds of hours of planning sessions to determine the best possible creative uses for the property. Horticultural experts, landscape architects, botanists, and environmental engineers have created and reviewed the site plans for the new campus. The results will be stunning.

Thanks to the generous donations of hundreds of residents of Southwest Michigan, and a grant from the Kresge Foundation, the new Program and Training Center building will feature state of the art environmental technology. The sloping roofs will carry rainwater away from the parking lots and main roads into holding ponds that retain the water and allow it to slowly return to the neighboring water system.  A recent grant from the Kalamazoo Foundation will be used to plan and engineer ways to control parking lot rainwater from running directly into Axtell Creek.  Even the flat roofed areas of the building itself will be “green”, planted with grasses to help control heating and cooling costs.

The reworked landscape at the corner will truly be a place of beauty, far superior to the dumping ground for construction waste that characterized this land for many years.  A survey of the existing plants was conducted prior to clearing the Maple Street property.  A large percentage of the trees at the corner were of the short-living, weedy variety. Another group, found to be diseased and dying, had the great potential to become hosts for borers and other unwanted pests. The valuable trees and plants were identified, tagged, and removed to a nursery for safe keeping until they can be replanted at the center.  The care devoted to every plant on the property can be seen in even the preservation of the lilac bushes along Crosstown Parkway that were kept in place and protected from the dozers and cutters.

A single flowering tree, tagged with yellow ribbon, stood out in the middle of the cleared viewing area during the groundbreaking ceremony. That tree represents what we hope the area will come to signify.  A place where girls can blossom and grow.   Girl Scout Troops and their families will walk along the barrier-free streambed and in our new gardens on an “International Journey” featuring plants and exhibits from the Girl Scout’s four world centers; India, Mexico, England, and Switzerland. These gardens and paths will become the focal points for environmental lessons and creative design. Outdoor ovens from Mexico will be used to demonstrate how others live and cook in an environment rarely seen by girls from Michigan. But most importantly, this space will become a place where girls from urban areas can associate with girls from rural areas.  It will be a place where groups of children can interact and ask questions of one another and their leaders without fear.  In short a place for every girl.

We are confident that with the help of donors, adult volunteers and leaders, and the thousands of Girl Scouts of the Glowing Embers Council, we will be able to offer Southwest Michigan a world class program and training facility. A place where girls grow strong.

Jan Barker,
CEO Girl Scouts of Glowing Embers Council