Gold Award Spotlight: Carolyn F. Bernard Stadium Renewal Project

Juliette, a Chesapeake Girl Scout, has earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor and achievement a girl can earn in Girl Scouting.

To earn the Gold Award, Juliette completed a renewal project at the Carolyn F. Bernard Stadium at Grassfield High School. The first part of her project was to create a memorial garden out front of the stadium honoring Anne McKim, the first athletic trainer at Grassfield High School, who passed away in 2010 at the young age of 29. Juliette assembled a team of volunteers to place native plants in the garden and arranged to have organizations at the school maintain the garden. She also chose a special stone that she had a memorial message engraved in to mark the garden as a place of remembrance.

The second part of Juliette’s project was founding and implementing a recycling program at the stadium. She installed signs about the recycling program throughout the stadium, and with the help of the Ecology Club at Grassfield High School, Juliette placed bins out for the football games. She conducted waste audits after the games to weigh the amount of trash and recycling to show the impact that her project is having on the environment. She collected approximately 20 percent of the waste as recycling and hopes to increase that number during the upcoming football season.

Juliette also worked with staff at Grassfield who knew Anne McKim to create a memorial book about her, and Juliette created guides about how to start a recycling program and about how to maintain the native plants in the garden at the school.

“I chose this project because I feel strongly about the need to recycle, and I felt it was important to remind future Grassfield students about the legacy of Anne McKim,” Juliette said.

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 six percent of eligible Girl Scouts earn the Gold Award, which adds Juliette to an elite group of female leaders across the country with the honor. In 2016, Girl Scouts are celebrating 100 years of girls changing the world during the centennial year of the Girl Scout Gold Award.