girl scouts of the colonial coast
Girl Scout Senior Grace from Hampton has earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor and achievement in Girl Scouting. For her project, Grace focused on diabetes and promoting how a healthy lifestyle could help prevent the disease. Grace chose to focus on this issue because her grandfather passed away from a series of problems due to diabetes, so she wanted to take action to spread a message about how to prevent it. Grace developed a series of lesson plans about healthy lifestyles and shared them with elementary and middle school students at Saint Mary Star of the Sea School during an afterschool club that she founded. During the club meetings, Grace taught the students different sports, showed them how to make healthy snacks and brought in special guest speakers to talk about diabetes.
“Healthy eating and exercising are good habits and may even prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes,” Grace said. “Through my project I was able to teach children about diabetes and show them how a healthy lifestyle can be fun.”
In order to share her project with a wider audience, Grace created a blog that she updated after weekly club meetings to share activities, healthy recipes and more.
The Gold Award requires girls to identify an issue in the community and carry out a Take Action project to address the matter through leadership work. Nationwide, less than 6 percent of eligible Girl Scouts earn the Gold Award, which adds Grace to an elite group of females across the country with the honor.
