The Girl Scout Gold Award: The Long, Rewarding Journey

Sheena Parimoo
Bridgewater Raritan High School 2008
Bridgewater, NJ

I feel honored to have received the Girl Scouts Gold Award upon completion of my project, titled “SAI Service: Sandwich Association in Service.” My project addressed the issue of poverty in New Jersey. I chose this project because I feel that not enough is being done to help the needy. There are several shelters that are constantly in need of food and clothing. Our society caters more toward improving the standards of living of those who already have enough and I know for a fact that if each person contributed a small amount of time, money, or thought in the process of eliminating poverty, we could all work together to get the task accomplished. The residents in homeless shelters barely had anything, and funding for these shelters is often limited. Therefore, I felt it was my job to inspire and lead an association at school that met on the last Thursday of each month to make a hundred peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for each of the shelters. I also learned how to knit patches and made a quilt for a needy family as well as taught youth and adults in shelters to knit patches (squares of yarn). Knitting is an excellent way to pass leisure time in a productive way, providing them with a nice warm gift at the end. The patches are assembled into quilts for the shelters. The shelters that were served with my project were Agape House, SHIP, Elijah’s Promise, Food Bank, and Martin Luther King Center in Somerset County, NJ.

Several steps were involved in completing my requirements for the Gold Award. As prerequisites, I completed three Interest Projects provided in a “Studio 2B Focus Book” and thirty leadership hours. I fulfilled my leadership hours by working as a paid junior counselor at a Girl Scouts camp known as “Camp DeWitt” for a total of forty hours. I also worked as a Scientist’s Aide at Genscript Corporation for about 70 hours.

The last part of the prerequisites was setting general goals for life and creating a “vision statement.” My two goals were “to become more efficient in delegating work as a leader while being more firm in requesting work to be submitted by deadlines,” and “planning my time more effectively so that I lead a balanced life.” My vision statement was to provide needs for homeless shelters. I wanted to see the community involved in a project that uplifts the youth. The project if started locally could move throughout the world.

After the prerequisites, I outlined the steps involved for putting my plan into action, including the facilities and equipment needed. I first contacted the school administrator to receive permission to start the club at school. I then found a project advisor and formed a team who was as interested as I was in this service. I contacted homeless shelters, bought the supplies and found a room to conduct meetings. I made flyers and posted them while arranging for rides to and from school to carry the sandwiches home to be distributed at the shelters that day or the next day. It was very important to constantly network among team members, my advisor, my school administrator, my troop leader, and the managers of the shelters. The morning of each meeting, my mom drove me to school to carry the large, heavy bag of supplies to be dropped off in the classroom. I also delegated responsibility to elected officers who assisted me with transportation and posting of flyers around the school. To evaluate the effectiveness of my project, I decided to receive feedback from the shelters to evaluate how my project helped them and if they would like to see the service continued. I also consulted my advisor, team, and the residents of the shelters to ask them for any suggestions or improvements. As for the quilts, I taught residents at Agape House and Martin Luther King shelter to knit by purchasing the yarn and a few sets of needles and teaching a small group of people how to knit squares of yarn to make patches. I finally made a large quilt with the help of an experienced quilt maker and donated it through United Way to a needy family hit by floods. An important part of the planning process was to estimate the overall project expenditure and meet these costs. During the entire process from planning and setting goals to achieving them, I kept a time log of the average time spent for each activity as well. - MORE -