22 Girl Scout Gold Award winners recognized at Reflections Ceremony

The Girl Scout Gold Award is a national award, a personal challenge and the highest award that a Girl Scout Senior or Ambassador may choose to pursue.

This year, 22 Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri (GSEM) received their Gold Awards at the annual Reflections ceremony, which took place at Maritz® in Fenton on June 2.

Earning The Girl Scout Gold Award requires a suggested 80 hours of planning and implementing a challenging, large-scale project that is innovative, engages others and has a lasting impact on its targeted community with an emphasis on sustainability.

Since 1916, the Girl Scout Gold Award has represented excellence and leadership for girls everywhere. Earning the Girl Scout Gold Award puts winners among an exceptional group of women who have used their knowledge and leadership skills to make a difference in the world (less than one percent of all Girl Scouts earn the Girl Scout Gold Award).

Below are excerpts from local Girl Scouts about their Gold Award projects:

Carolyn Beard

After hearing one of her teacher's personal stories of how segregation, military service and education changed his life, Carolyn was inspired to find a way to preserve peoples’ stories in their own words.

Carolyn’s project, throughMYeyes, perpetuated the untold stories of everyday people. She conducted interviews with people who were affected by local, national and world events.

Emily Moss

For her Gold Award project, Emily researched autism and learned that exercise improves stamina, muscle strength, psychological health and quality of life for children with special needs.

Working with the American School and the Howard Park Center, she designed a physical fitness curriculum with help from physical and occupational therapists, physical education teachers and those who work with children who have special needs. She and her advisors designed a fitness area, collected gym equipment and wrote a physical education curriculum.