She never got to be a Girl Scout, so she started a troop and has mentored hundreds

Girl Scout Troop 347 began with six girls and a young mother patching together a flag with white felt letters, sheets of blue fabric and glue around a Miami Gardens school cafeteria table in the late 1980s.

The troop has since grown to become a staple of the community, giving dozens of young girls the opportunity to travel around the country, drive change in their communities, and receive national recognition and college scholarships.

Behind it all is Janice Coakley, the troop’s founder, now a mother of two adult daughters and the beloved mentor for more than 60 current and former Girl Scouts.

On July 25, Girl Scouts of Tropical Florida thanked Coakley for her three decades of service by presenting her with a high honor, the 2020 Judge Edith Atkinson Award, named after the first female judge of Dade County, who founded the county’s first Girl Scout Council in 1924.

“I always tell my girls, ‘Be good at what you choose to do,’ ” Coakley, 62, recently said. “That’s what I’ve tried to do all these years with the Girl Scouts... To receive an award for someone as great as Judge Atkinson, it’s just an incredible honor.”

Coakley is the fourth person in Girl Scouts of Tropical Florida’s history to receive the award, which is granted only to members who have dedicated more than 20 years to the organization and gone “beyond expectations” to become role models for the girls and young women they lead.

As a girl, Coakley said she didn’t have the opportunity to join her local Girl Scouts troop in Opa-locka, where she grew up. But it had been a dream of hers for years that her children have that experience.

“I always wanted to be in Girl Scouts, but I couldn’t because my mom was a single mom and she didn’t drive,” Coakley said. “So, coming up, I wanted to make sure that my kids were involved.”

Through friends and community members, she found five sixth- and seventh-graders to join her oldest daughter, Kenika, in an ambitious project: creating a new troop of Girl Scouts based in Miami Gardens.

Their first assignment was to create the troop’s flag. It took them three meetings at Norland Middle School in Miami Gardens to finish the project, which Coakley preserves on a flagpole at her home to this day.

“I have an official Girl Scouts troop flag now, but that [first] flag I keep because it reminds me of the six girls that I started with,” Coakley said, thinking back at her first years as a scout leader when her entire troop could fit in one car.

Many things have changed since, Coakley said. The troop has changed its colors from blue and white to khaki and pink, has grown to twice its size and now meets at Brentwood Elementary School, about three miles away from the troop’s original meeting spot.

But Coakley continues, year and after year, to infuse her girls with the same sound values, skills and drive to fulfill their potential.

“She’s like another mother. She’s someone you can depend on and who just guides you through life,” said Jauntre’ Gray, from Kendall, a 16-year-old Girl Scout Ambassador in Coakley’s troop.

Under her leader’s guidance, Gray is developing a program to help other students find scholarships and apply for college. She is on her way to becoming one of more than 30 girls under Coakley’s mentorship to receive the Girl Scout Gold Award, its highest accolade, which recognizes scouts that drive lasting change in their community.

Two of Coakley’s girls have also earned the Gates Scholarship for outstanding minority high school seniors from low-income households.

Thanks to Coakley, Gray also explored the country, traveling with the troop from Savannah, Georgia, to Washington to New York City to Niagara Falls and several cities in Canada.

“Those are trips you don’t forget,” a former scout in Coakley’s troop, Cynthia Touissant, said of her Girl Scout travels more than 20 years ago.

“She exposed us to different ways of life, to travel. There are a lot of troops in the Girl Scouts that didn’t do as much as we did. Janice was the driving force behind all of it,” said Touissant, 31, who received a scholarship to Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens through the many resources Coakley offered.

Now a mother of two herself, Touissant she said she strives every day to carry Coakley’s values and lessons forward through her two young sons. She still speaks to Coakley often, she said.

“I try to keep in touch with all of my girls,” said Coakley. “And sometimes they come back and I know that all the years of community service and the scholarships and the events and the counseling, that all of this prepared them for life.”

Coakley continues to mentor the girls of Troop 347 and seeks adult volunteers to join her in helping them grow into strong and caring women, she said.