Cadettes from Girl Scout Troop 60385 — Makena Large, Kaitlyn Seymour and Nika Wallach — worked on earning their Silver Award, the highest honor a cadette can achieve, by doing a library renovation project at the main campus of Casa Pacifica in Camarillo.
Casa Pacifica Centers for Children and Families is a crisis-care and residential treatment facility for foster or at-risk children in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
Over the past year the girls, who called themselves the Library Lemons, have dedicated their weekends and time after school to work on the project. The renovation included repainting the walls, a complete book inventory, restocking the library with current and age-appropriate books, reorganization, and catalog creation.
The idea to incorporate Casa Pacifica into their Silver Award came from Large, whose family had begun donating to the nonprofit in honor of her late mother ,who as a child had spent time in the foster system.
Casa Pacifica’s mental health programs serve foster and at-risk youth. Community businesses partnered with the scouts to make their project a reality — Frontier Paint in Ojai donated paint and Cabrillo Middle School (the girls’ former school) donated their surplus library books.
To source additional books, the girls posted messages on the Nextdoor app and Facebook, then picked up the books from people’s front porches. They collected close to 1,000 books for the library.
Once their library was completed, the Library Lemons went a step further and purchased rolling library carts so the books could meet the kids of Casa Pacifica wherever they are – in their cottages, at school … .
Then just when the girls thought the library was finished, ProSource Wholesale offered to donate carpeting, and an anonymous donor stepped up to cover the cost of the carpet installation.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented a significant challenge to the scouts’ endeavor when Casa Pacifica had to close its campus to visitors, but the girls persevered, coming on the weekends completely masked and sequestered in the library until the job was finished.
“These girls were pretty ambitious, they really shot for the moon,” said troop leader Andi Kish. “What I love is they were able to pivot when circumstances got hard. It took a tremendous amount of dedication and prioritization.”
The campus, home to Casa Pacifica’s residential treatment programs, nonpublic school, and outpatient services, opened the Rotary Clubs of Camarillo Library in 1995.
When Casa Pacifica first opened, it served a different population” toddlers to teens, and some infants. Today, it has an older population, ages 9-17, based on current needs.
The library overhaul made the space more appealing and usable with the addition of current and age-appropriate books. It has brought a renewed love of reading back to Casa Pacifica. A few youth are even hoping to start a book club and have begun to request books they want to read that aren’t currently stocked in the library.
To purchase any of the books on their wishlist, visit Casa Pacifica’s Amazon registry, https://smile.amazon.com/hz/charitylist/ls/QGWWQJBWRS83/ref=smi_ext_lnk_lcl_cl.
For more about Casa Pacifica, visit www.casapacifica.org or call the Development & Public Relations Department, 805-445-7800.