A Note From the Founder – The Importance of Community Service
Kerry Cordy
Ever wonder why getting kids involved in community service is so important? It’s not just about helping others—it’s about helping kids grow into stronger, more capable adults. Community service teaches life skills that stay with them forever.
Take teamwork, for example. When kids work together to clean up a park or organize a food drive, they learn how to communicate, cooperate, and problem-solve. These skills translate directly into their future workplaces, where collaboration is key. They also develop empathy by seeing the world through others’ eyes, making them more compassionate and understanding leaders.
Community service also builds resilience and responsibility. Kids who help out regularly learn the value of commitment and the satisfaction of seeing a job through. They discover their strengths, gain confidence, and realize they can make a difference—an empowering lesson that fuels their ambitions as adults.
By engaging in service, kids understand how their actions contribute to the bigger picture, whether it’s improving their neighborhood or addressing global challenges. They grow up more aware, socially responsible, and motivated to create positive change.
So, when we encourage kids to serve their communities, we’re not just building stronger neighborhoods today—we’re shaping the productive, thoughtful, and compassionate leaders of tomorrow.
Need ideas to get started? Check out blog post A Year’s Worth of Service Projects.
New Badges Added
Rice Badge, Microwave Cooking Badge, Local History Badge
Upcoming Badge Sale!
Mark your calendar! Every year we put our badges on sale at 10% off for the entire month of January. This is a great time to stock up on badges you plan to earn. That said, please remember that our badges are made-on-demand and are non-refundable so make sure that if you purchase badges you actually earn them.
While the badges are on sale the entire month, traditionally people end up waiting until the last few days of the month to place their orders. As a result, orders placed toward the end of the month tend to take longer to fill as we get swamped with orders all at once. If you need your badges by a certain date, please make sure to order at least 3 weeks before you need them and send us an email requesting them by a specific date. While we can’t guarantee delivery on time, we always do our best to ensure customers get their badges when they need them.
Badger Clipart and Printables
Did you know we have a mascot? His name is Badger, the badge hound. If you visit the Resources section of the website there are printable binder covers and dividers you can use to help set up a binder to track your badges and activities. There is even a Badge Hound badge you can earn if you are as passionate about earning badges as Badger is!
Badges Lead to a Family Business
by Cynthia Lillemo
The Badge That Started It All…
Like so many others, I am one of those homeschool moms who never expected to be a homeschool mom. I’ve never considered myself much of a teacher and honestly, even after six years, I still often find the task intimidating. The good news is that early in our journey, we found Frontier Girls and on more than one occasion a badge has come to my rescue. Frontier Girls was the perfect fit for our family; a wonderful group of girls to meet with and learn with, a wonderful leadership team who we knew truly loved us and cared about our development (Thank you Mr. George!) and an organization that had the perfect blend of curriculum without all the “other stuff”. I truly cherish my time with our troop in Christiansburg Virginia, brief as it was.
After only a little more than one year with our troop there our family relocated to Harrison Arkansas, where Frontier Girls/Quest Clubs did not have any established troops. However, because Troop 100 was a possibility, we were able to continue. This would come to be an important feature in our family in the coming days.
You see, our oldest daughter is an entrepreneur (and leader) at heart. She is always looking for new ways to earn money. She once begged and begged to set up a lemonade stand at the end of our driveway on our out of the way country road, where only our neighbors pass by and then proceeded to put her little brother in charge of attending the stand! I often found myself constantly telling her “no, you can’t do this” and “no, you can’t do that” for this reason or that reason.
One day, when she was about six years old, as we were preparing to make a Walmart run, she came to me with a hand full of “jewelry” she had made from yarn and plastic pony beads and asked me if she could sell them inside Walmart. I told her “no, that is strictly prohibited”, but she would not be deterred. She then asked if she could sell them in the parking lot. I seriously had only the proverbial “milk, bread, and eggs” that I needed to grab and time was of the essence, so I told her to talk to her dad about selling in the parking lot, and I ran into the store. I think that trip is still my record for shortest amount of time spent in Walmart, but when I came out my daughter (under the careful eye of her dad) had sold all but a few of her items, had a hand full of cash and a beaming smile that went from ear to ear! As I stood there looking at my child full of joy and excitement, I knew in my heart that her entrepreneurial spirit was something that I needed to wholeheartedly encourage and carefully shape, instead of continually discouraging it.
So, I became determined to help her improve her skills so she would have a viable product to sell. We went to the craft store to get better supplies and I turned to Frontier Girls to find a way to improve her skills. It was there where I found the “Beading” badge and we dug into it. She tried several different techniques one of which was loom beading. While she quickly decided that loom beading was not for her and moved on to other styles, as an “Owl” I was doing the badge along with her and I really enjoyed it. However, I also quickly decided the bead loom we bought from the craft store was not going to cut it.
My husband and I looked online to find a bead loom design that would be better for my new hobby. Since the loom we found was made overseas and would cost more to ship than the actual loom itself, my hubby decided he would be able to make it in his shop. When he brought me the loom he had made and I tried it out, beaming with pride I made an unsuspecting post on Facebook about how excited I was. And just like that, our small business was born.
Now, about four years after that trip to Walmart, my daughter has tried about a hundred different money making ideas, and we have moved from selling her wares at a local farmers market, to a small store front in our town, to finally a thriving Etsy shop (https://oakhillfamilyfarm.etsy.com ) where we sell several different sizes of our bead looms along with a special category where our daughter can sell her crafty ideas as well. She is now expanding her sales training from “in person” selling to online sales and customer service.
We also recently started a new Facebook Group (Loom Beading with Oak Hill Family Farm | Facebook ) intended to foster communication with our customers in order to help improve our looms, share the knowledge we have, learn from each other, and just to have fun beading. To this day, every time someone asks how it all started I am instantly brought back to the smile on my daughter’s face in that parking lot and the badge that started it all.
