Girl Scouts are out to make a difference in their community while completing the Gold Award along the way. Eleven young women attended their final Girl Scout Gold Award interview and evaluation last Tuesday evening, the last step in completing the approval process for earning this prestigious award. The Girl Scout Gold Award is the highest, national achievement within Girl Scouting for girls, 9th through 12th grade. Only 5.4% of eligible Girl Scouts successfully complete their project. To earn the Girl Scout Gold Award requires a minimum of 80 hours of planning and implementing a challenging, large-scale project that shows leadership, is innovative, engages others and has a lasting impact on the community with an emphasis on sustainability.

Danielle Dowdy, Emily Esther, Rachel Musick, MaryAnn VanWalleghen and Chelsea Welch are Girl Scout Seniors and Ambassadors that made it a point to go for the gold. These five young women stood out with extraordinary projects that will surely prove to have a lasting impact on the targeted community.

Danielle Dowdy, a 16-year-old Girl Scout from Ste. Genevieve, Mo., dedicated months to creating a goldfish pond in the Cancer Center Garden at Sainte Genevieve’s Memorial Hospital while earning her Girl Scout Gold Award. The Cancer Center Garden is a place for oncology patients and their families to visit to reflect. Danielle’s objective was to provide a comforting and soothing element to the hospital’s garden. She spent her summer spreading mulch, tending and watering plants, gathering large rocks, and installing a water fountain at the center of the pond.

Danielle said that she decided to focus her project on improving the hospital’s garden because wanted to give families and patients a place to relax and see the beauty of life. Ste. Genevieve employees have said that Danielle’s project has proven to be very soothing for patients.

Danielle feels that the Girl Scout Gold Award project has positively affected her life by helping her become more of a leader. She also said that she is more caring and respectful toward her community and the rest of the world. Danielle said that the most successful part of her Gold Award project was learning that the garden was so well-received.

Emily Esther, a 16-year-old Girl Scout from the Frontenac area, dedicated more than 100 hours toward renovating a visitation room for supervised meetings between parents and children at Every Child’s Hope Foster Care Facility for her Girl Scout Gold Award. Every Child’s Hope (ECH) is a non-profit organization that works with children who are wards of the court by assisting them and their families in their individual quest for health and wholeness through quality, faithful, professional services.

Prior to Emily’s renovation, the visiting room was described as sparse, stark and cavernous. Emily made a supply list, investigated costs and recruited volunteers to assist her with the renovation. She consulted with an interior designer and shopped for supplies and tool rentals. Emily also painted the room and collected furniture, toys and books to be placed throughout the area.

Emily’s completed project was so successful that ECH employees praised her performance. Michael P. Brennan, the Executive Director of Every Child’s Hope, wrote to say that the space is used more often than ever before and that in many cases the kids don’t want to leave. He also said that before Emily completed her Girl Scout project the space was large and spacious but lacked a warm and friendly place for therapists to work with children and families. Emily is responsible for solving that problem.

Rachel Musick, a 17-year-old Girl Scout from South City, dedicated years to receiving funding and approval from her local government to build a physical fitness station in Tilles Park. Rachel worked with the City Parks Department, her neighborhood alderman, and the park association. Rachel started her project in February 2009 and finished in August 2011.

In addition to the exercise station, Rachel’s project includes a map of the park’s walking path and distance markers for park users to keep track of how much they’ve exercised.  The exercise station includes a push-up station, a body-curl station, a bench-dip station and more.

Rachel said that receiving approval and working with her local government was a challenge that she’s glad she’s had to overcome. Throughout her project she also had to adjust to budget cuts which required her to redesign plans she had for the park. From this experience Rachel said that she’s learned that she has a bit more patience than she originally thought. She also said that she was happy to learn that she’s able to stick it out in situations even when things are not looking up.

Rachel believes that her exercise station is a great addition to the park and she knows that it will always be used. She hopes that by completing the exercise station, she will inspire people in the community to go outside and exercise.

MaryAnn VanWalleghen, a 17-year-old Girl Scout from O’Fallon, dedicated months to painting the alphabet and seasons on ceiling tiles for a kindergarten room at Independence Elementary. The tiles are used in the to help reinforce the letters and sounds the children are being taught in the classroom. To make the tiles fun, MaryAnn added pictures to accompany each letter.

MaryAnn said that one challenge she faced during her project was changing the pictures she used to accompany each letter to match the phonemic teaching style being used at the school called LTRS. MaryAnn recalls having a hard time deciding on a picture to accompany the letter “E.” Elephant is the first thing to come to mind but the phonemic teaching style says that the pronunciation of elephant most closely resembles the letter “L.”

MaryAnn overcame her challenge and delivered a great product. She also displayed leadership by recruiting people to help her paint the ceiling tiles, which was not an easy task. The ceiling tiles require several coats of primer and if too much paint was added too fast, the tiles would warp.

MaryAnn said that most successful part of her project was hearing about the joy the kindergartners felt when they saw the new tiles in the classroom. MaryAnn hopes that the tiles will get students excited about learning their ABCs. School employees have said that it is their understanding that the new tiles will become a permanent fixture in the classroom.

Chelsea Welch, an 18-year-old Girl Scout for Jefferson County, Mo., assumed the role of a fair coordinator for her Gold Award project by helping to plan the Mastodon Art & Science Regional Fair. The role that Chelsea assumed is normally a paid position but due to lack of funding the role was eliminated. If Chelsea had not stepped up, all of the work she did would not have been done by anyone. Chelsea’s work was so successful that she helped attract over 3500 visitors, more than the event has ever had in the past.

Chelsea’s responsibilities included getting the word out about the fair, creating a red carpet event for sponsors and awardees, decorating the Jefferson College Field House, organizing the registration/sigh in of the students, and determining activities for visitors of all ages. Chelsea inspired sponsors to attend the event by putting an article in the paper, making an announcement at church, and talking to people personally about the importance of the event. Chelsea felt that it was important that the children participating in this art and science fair felt appreciated and accomplished.

From this experience, Chelsea said that she has learned that she is good at time management and event coordination. She has also learned how to be more outgoing and assertive. She felt her biggest success was that it was the most attended event in the history of the fair.

Jill Macom, the Executive Director of the Mastodon Fair, wrote to say that Chelsea put on one of the best organized events that her team has seen. Jill said that Chelsea has definitely laid a foundation that could be used by others to put on this event in years to come.

In June, these young ladies will join the 2012 Gold Awardees to be honored and receive their award in a special Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri council-wide recognition ceremony. Girl Scouts will continue to complete their Gold Award project through the end of this year and the beginning of the 2012. Stay tuned for additional stories about other Girl Scouts from eastern Missouri completing extraordinary projects.

Aniela and her family had the most amazing Girl Scout summer. They spent most of the summer watching Aniela, a Girl Scout Junior, perform community service and earn her Bronze award. After much consideration the summer before, Aniela decided that she would volunteer her time and talent to help with the Sea Turtle Conservation in Florida. In order to accomplish this, Aniela worked very hard to sell more than 400 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, almost double the amount of cookies that she had sold in the past.  Aniela would use some of this money to pay for the turtle activities that she wanted to do while in Florida and the additional money would be donated to support the Sea Turtle Conservation.

Aniela’s summer began with a visit to Savannah, Georgia, Juliette Low’s birthplace. From there, Aniela and her family drove down the coast to meet some sea turtles. They stopped in Jekyll Island, Georgia at the Georgia Sea Turtle Hospital where Aniela met a turtle named Phantom. At the time, Phantom was receiving rehab and would soon be released into the wild with a GPS tracker attached so that scientists could watch his movements and study his behavior. Aniela chose to adopt the turtle by giving some of the money she earned to help biologists pay for the expenses of his rehab and the costly GPS tracker that they attached to Phantom. Aniela is able to track him as well at “When we got back to St. Louis the first thing I did was sign on to see where Phantom was, “ Aniela said. “I saw that he had been all over Georgia! He travels quite a bit.”

After her visit in Georgia, Aniela traveled to a sea turtle hospital in Marathon, Florida. There, Aniela donated more money to adopt a resident turtle named Montel that could not be released. “He [Montel] had been through a lot and he looked pretty banged up. He’d been attacked by a shark, hit by a boat, and was missing an eye,” Aniela said. She felt it was important for Montel to have a good life even though he would live in a swimming pool for the rest of his years.

Traveling to the turtle hospitals has helped Aniela learn a lot about sea turtles. “I can now identify different species of sea turtles, I know how many eggs they lay on average, and I know how long it takes for the eggs to hatch,” said Aniela. She also earned the Turtle Watch patch from the Girl Scouts of Gulf Coast Florida Council.

Next, Aniela started her volunteer work near Sarasota, Florida under the guidance of permit holders registered to work with sea turtles. She helped three different times on night patrols that began at 9pm where she rode up and down the beach in a golf cart watching for sea turtles coming on shore to nest. Once the females started laying their eggs Aniela would help check the turtle for tags and record data. Her nightly patrols totaled about 12 hours of volunteer work.

During the morning patrols, which began at 6 o’clock, Aniela walked a section of the beach with other volunteers to look for newly laid nests. Any new nests were then recorded and marked. If a nest was close to a public area, Aniela helped mark off the nest with stakes and yellow tape to warn people not to step on it. When nests were found partially dug up by a predator, Aniela helped carry the broken shells and yolks away from the nest to bury them near the water so that the predator would not be drawn back to the nest.  During the second morning patrol, Aniela also actively helped with a nest excavation. The nest had been recorded as hatched three days prior. Aniela helped dig up the nest to count and record all eggs found in the nest that hatched or did not hatch. She was able to rescue a live hatchling that had gotten stuck in the nest and hadn’t made it out. With Aniela’s help, the hatchling was freed from the nest and was able to crawl to the water and swim away! She decided to name the hatchling Hope. “It sounded graceful and happy,” Aniela said. “A life that I hope she leads in the future.”

Aniela has always loved working with animals, but from this experience she is certain some day she will work at one of the facilities she visited to continue to help sea turtles.