I'm the Sec/Personal Progress Specialist for our ward's YW.  I thought I'd share with you what has worked for us:

We were having problems keeping on top of the interviews for our Personal Progress and so we decided to hold quarterly interviews.  We chose to do all of our Year 2000 Personal Progress Interviews on the 5th Sundays which would give us 4 of them.

The first was in Jan and we had a "Brunch with the Bunch" where all of the girls came to one house (Beehives first - Mia Maids next - and Laurels last) on a Sunday morning (with Bishop's permission-Church starts at 1:30 for us) and the leaders were there to go over their books with them. While they waited for their interview turn and afterwards - while they waited for friends, the girls just sat around and visited/bonded and ate breakfast foods that we'd brought. It was SO SUCCESSFUL! There were only 2 girls out of 48 that didn't participate.  Our Bishop was thrilled about it - he told everyone!

Last night we had our second get together and did a Values Night. We made the cute, cute Bubble Gum Journal Jars- Individual Worth. (Thank you Alice for this wonderful idea.) The girls just loved them! A lot of bonding went on as they folded those little slips of papers.

In another corner of the room we had the girls listing the Positive Qualities of their Mother on nice cardstock and then had stamps and inkpads set out for them to turn the lists into beautiful Mother's Day Cards - Divine Nature. (One of our leaders is a "Stampin' Up" Rep and is so creative! She did a wonderful job teaching them some new techniques.)

I also raided our YW closet and found a good stack of old pamphlets with Pres. Benson's talk titled: "To the Young Women of the Church". We had been trying to find a time when we could go over this with our girls so last night we had smaller groups break away and do an overview discussion of the talk while filling out a little worksheet that I drew up on the computer. I printed them out on Purple paper (with a DJ Inkers clip art border) and we tied this in with Integrity.

We also had a Laurel Project table. Our graduating Laurels have done their projects but are so busy with life that they haven't had time to write them up - so we had everything there for them to do that last night. The Bishop even arranged his schedule to do interviews with them through the night and we have almost all of our graduating Laurels ready to receive their Young Womanhood Medallions!

Throughout the evening our Presidency members were calling on the girls one by one and taking them to a classroom where they went over their Personal Progress updates. I had set the rooms up with a table and 2 chairs. The little tables had a value color table cloth, with their age group poster (the pink ones from the Distribution Center that have the age group logo and mission statement on them), a set of scriptures and a flower arrangement done in one of the value colors. We also had a little display of the jewelry on each table. Some of the girls had never seen some of the jewelry - especially the Young Womanhood Medallion. I think this was very motivational for them to see close up.

We topped off the evening with Rootbeer Floats.  All in all, the evening was a tremendous success. The girls asked if we could do this more often - the leaders did also. It was an incredible amount of work for preparation - next time I will do a better job of delegating. Major bonding took place through the evening. Everyone pitched in to do the clean up at the end of the evening.

Next Sunday we will have another "Morning Munch" at the home of our counselor and then around Nov we will have another Values night.  At the interviews, each leader had a list of all the girls' personal progress records and was able to review them for accuracy. They were also able to get them ready for upcoming birthday interviews with the Bishop.

Personal Progress