The Gold Award is the highest award a girl can earn
in Girl Scouting. It’s a national standard that acknowledges a girl’s accomplishments, leadership, commitment, creativity, and personal effort to make the world a better place. Each Gold Award is a significant achievement in a girl’s life and an extension and compilation of all she has learned through her Girl Scout experience.

Our next Gold Award project features Julianna Mudgett’s project “Singing for the Future,” her project was formed to promote American Sign Language across the community. It focused on introducing the Deaf community to young students and spark an interest in American Sign Language (ASL) and the community that uses it. The hope being that students would want to continue the journey of learning ASL and want to use it in their future. Julianna believes that introducing this at a young age would help create a more accepting environment and bring people together and more receptive to the deaf and special needs communities. During this project she was halted by the global pandemic. Julianna kept persevering and adapted to make sure her project was successful. Using technology and creative ways of communicating she completed her project with success. Being flexible throughout these difficult times in turn gave her more respect from these communities as well.

Julianna’s favorite quote:

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”
-Jimmy Dean

Julianna plans on attending college to major in Nursing. Being a Girl Scout since Kindergarten, she has grown such a love for helping communities around her and she wants to continue this passion through nursing.

Our next Gold Award project feature is Kayla Horton’s project “Monarch Waystation Educational Project.” Kayla successfully created a nationally registered Monarch Waystation in the Life Lab at Tierra Linda Elementary School. This was a collaborative effort, involving teachers, her principal, and volunteers. Her project is currently thriving and will produce many generations of Monarchs for future classes to enjoy and interactively learn about.

Kayla’s project was helped with the guidance of her teacher Ms. Adrian, and lengthy online research, she was able to create lesson plans for teachers to follow in the future. The instructions included information about Monarch’s and their life cycle; the two migration patterns of the Monarch’s (Canada to central Mexico as well as the northern U.S.A. which is west of the Rockies to the west coast of the U.S.A); as well as how mankind’s environmental has negatively impacted the Monarchs population which includes the removal of Milkweed, climate change and illegal deforestation of resting grounds. The document also included information about the maintenance of the Monarch Waystation and is currently making a difference in the Monarch’s ability to recover.

Check out these YouTube links that highlight portions of the project: https://youtu.be/A83L9BdhgI0 and https://youtu.be/QDob6HzPgpY.

Kayla learned success is not only through one’s own hard work, but collaboration with others is essential to a projects success, utilizing the knowledge of others accompanied with those professional’s skills and abilities.

Kayla plans to attending college next year, concentrating in the sciences. Her goal is a degree in the medical field, as it will allow her to pursue something that I’m interested in and at the same time gives her the opportunity and ability to help others.

Our eighteenth featured Gold Award recipient, features Lauren Sweet with her project “Adult Center Medical Equipment Renovation.” Lauren completed a medical equipment storage unit renovation at her local Active Adult Center. The center lets previously hospitalized patients borrow medical equipment such as wheelchairs, walkers, or commodes for free to assist them as they heal. Many people who have recently been discharged from the hospital can’t afford to rent or buy the equipment that they need and it usually leads to a greater injury and further hospitalization. Lauren knew having free and reliable wheelchairs or walkers creates a safer environment that will increase their quality of life without the burden of increased medical bills. The Active Adult Center’s equipment storage unit was in disarray and she made it her mission to fix that problem. Lauren gathered a few volunteers and worked all day to clean, fix, and reorganize the equipment in the storage shed. During the project, she met with a journalist from The Acorn Newspaper to talk about my project. Lauren used this opportunity have the journal write a request to ask readers for more medical equipment to be donated.

Lauren states, “Throughout my project, I learned how to lead the people around me to create an efficient and light-hearted environment that made me feel inspired to do similar projects such as this in the future.”

Lauren plans to plan to complete similar medical related projects as she goes through college to become a nurse. She plans to continue volunteering at her local hospital and with the knowledge she gains from that experience, hopes to apply that experience to nursing school and further her career.