By Ashley M. Casey

Associate Editor

Three Baldwinsville Girl Scouts spent their summer and fall making a small square of Syracuse a better place for refugees and New Americans.

Julianna Gingrich, Sophia Randolph and Corinne Parker — all eighth-graders at Durgee Junior High School — renovated the garden at one of the Hopeprint residences on Lilac Street for their Girl Scout Silver Award.

The Silver Award is the second-highest honor a Girl Scout can earn. Senior or Ambassador-level Girl Scouts may go on to earn their Gold Award. Cadettes — Girl Scouts in grades 6 through 8 — must log 50 hours of work on a community service project that reaches beyond their troop to qualify for the Silver Award.

Randolph and Parker learned about Hopeprint by volunteering through the church they both attend. Hopeprint focuses on a 30-block neighborhood in Syracuse bordered by North Salina, East Division, Park and Kirkpatrick streets. About half of the people who call this Northside neighborhood home are immigrants. The organization helps refugees and New Americans create stable, thriving lives in Syracuse.

“The girls found out that Syracuse was one of the top five cities for refugees,” said Melanie Randolph, Sophia’s mother.

The Randolph family has volunteered at an orphanage in Honduras, so Sophia Randolph readily took to the idea of helping women and children in need through Hopeprint.

“We’re helping people and a lot of time goes into both,” Randolph said. “In the end, you end up happier because you just feel good helping people.”

Hopeprint owns three residential homes on Lilac Street, one of which had an overgrown garden in need of some TLC.

“This needed to be fixed for a while now,” Parker said of the garden.

Donning masks during the hottest days of the summer, the girls tore out weeds, tilled the soil, laid down landscape paper and planted fresh perennials and ground cover in the garden. Using the proceeds from their 2020 cookie sales as well as $1,300 in  monetary and in-kind donations from local businesses and community members, the three Scouts planted hostas, mums, black-eyed Susans, sweet woodruff, myrtle and blueberry bushes.

“There’s a little bit of everything there,” Gingrich said. “I like helping the community out and making it a safer environment.”

One of the main components of a Girl Scout project is sustainability. The blueberry bushes will provide a healthy snack for residents in the coming years, and the girls put together rock garden painting kits for children in the neighborhood.

“Multiple people are going to be able to see the garden. It’s going to have a long-lasting effect,” Parker said.

“It’s just a place where they can all hang out,” Randolph said of the Lilac Street residents.

The girls also unearthed the decorative pavers from the garden and restored them to their former glory. They added the finishing touches to their project by painting a colorful mural on the wall behind the garden.

“We painted over it and we made this cute little design,” Parker said.

While COVID-19 has put a damper on many of the Scouts’ usual activities — the troop will not be able to sing carols and decorate cookies at a local nursing home this year, as is their tradition — the girls are still able to work on badges over Zoom and engage in some outdoor activities like orienteering and a field trip to a reindeer farm.

“Seeing my friends is always a plus to my day,” Randolph said.

To learn more about Hopeprint’s mission and how to help support the organization, visit hopeprint.org/syracuse/.