Save Westana Day 7

First off, if you were looking for up to date Save Westana information, go to our facebook page and our blog (Save Westana Girlscout Camp).....here you will only find my own blogging.

But, if you are here on purpose...holy cow, what a week!  A week ago tonight, we were sitting around a table at a leader meeting talking about what we could do to save Westana.  We were thinking initially about ways to get the word out to troops and parents to send letter to council in answer to their letter to members soliciting feedback due to a  notice that our lease would be increasing from $5,000 a year to $25,000 a year.  If you read my last blog here, you saw that I was starting up a facebook page and a blog devoted to the cause (on behalf of our group of leaders' unofficial efforts to get things going).

By the weekend our numbers were growing, and we were getting responses from very interested people.  By Sunday, I sat down for 4 hours with a very knowledgeable local GS dad who's daughter and family had put hundreds of hours into Westana in recent years.

By Monday night, while trying to spruce things up, I saw the first newspaper article on line......I was in the newspaper (just not as me), as was one of my pictures.  The paper didn't contact us, but they did quote our sites correctly, and the information from the DNRC and from the other organization who's lease rate increased was very helpful at getting us on the right track.


By Tuesday our ideas were coming together with better information, and I feel like we're really on track for bringing council some really solid ideas.  And the awareness aspect has certainly been a success so far.  We have viable but very difficult options, so this will take a heck of a lot more than us, but there is definitely interest from a heck of a lot more people than us......definitely more than we've reached so far.

I hope people keep watching the sites and the news, because this can be done, but time is not on our side and there's an enormously long road ahead of us even under the best case scenarios.

These girls and this camp are SO worth it.

When I finally download my pictures from our day at camp with Rebecca Vogt yesterday, I'll post them here.  In the mean time, you can see some of the people that were there on the news story, but I don't think they showed her.  Katie was on a lot though, and they used the only sentences of mine I would have wanted them to.  Our Unit Leader, Naureen, and her daughter Kendra did terrific.

So far, we've got the facebook page, the blog, and we've seen at least 2 tv stories and 7 newspaper articles.  The first article gave our facebook page, the subsequent associated press articles don't mention it and I don't think they say anything about writing letters to council or that local members are working to help council save the camp.  I hope these aren't the last stories, so that people will know what they can do as things progress.