A small group of high school girls in San Benito County make the commitment to achieve the highest honor in the Girl Scout world each year – the Gold Award. To achieve the honor, Girl Scouts have to propose an idea that will have a long-lasting impact on their community and they need to be dedicated to completing the project by the October after graduating from high school.
In San Benito, a handful of students are in the process of putting together a proposal or awaiting approval of their project, including Mary Medeiros, a senior at San Benito High School.
“The Gold Award allows me to help my community,” Medeiros said. “Instead of one individual person, it will affect everyone.”
Medeiros’ proposal includes plans for a garden at Tres Pinos School.
“In Hollister, we have a drought problem so I always want to make a garden somewhere so students can see things grow,” she said. “Tres Pinos is such a small school not a lot of people think about them.”
Medeiros said she plans to include native plants and drought-resistant plants, added that the Stonegate development, where some of the Tres Pinos students live, has had water shortages for landscaping.
“I was thinking of a drought-resistance garden with curriculum to go with the plants, and how they don’t need that much water to survive,” she said.
She selected a raised area near the entrance to the parking lot of the school that is visible from Airline Highway. She said the location has irrigation installed already, an Eagle Scout project completed by her cousin.
She first started thinking about a Gold Award project when she was a freshman or a sophomore, she said. She went to a meeting at the Girl Scout Council in Castroville, to get the information about how to put together the proposal. She has been working on her proposal, and used visits to the demonstration garden at Dunne Park and the fire-resistance garden at the Hollister Fire Station on Union Road to get ideas for it.
“The most challenging part would be basically making sure that everything is planned out and everything works well,” she said.
She admitted that she is nervous about getting the project completed on time, though she has some practice with community work. Girl Scout troops often participate in Bronze and Silver projects, on which they can work together.
“This one is a lot more challenging because it’s on your own,” Medeiros said.
She said she plans to submit her project proposal in December or January. It takes about a month for the committee to approve or deny the proposals. Medeiros plans to raise the money to complete the project through bake sales or donations from local businesses.
Shari Schmidt, who is the service unit manager for San Benito Girl Scouts, said the projects really have to be a benefit to the general community.
“They have to find a need in the community that is sustainable and get that need taken care of,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt said that the Scouts can collect in-kind donations and can coordinate with volunteers to help with the project.
“Right now the buzz words for Girl Scouts are ‘Discover, Connect, Take Action,’ so that’s what they are doing,” she said. “They are discovering a need, connecting with resources and taking action to complete it.”
Juliana Morcate, a freshman at Sonoma State University, completed her Gold Award project last summer. Like Medeiros, her project included a school garden, at Marguerite Maze Middle School.
“I went there and I just knew being in classes around it – the space is open and not being used for anything,” she said.
Morcate raised money through a side job, sewing patches on the vests of other Girl and Boy Scouts. She also coordinated with a teacher at Maze, who she referred to as a mentor and who received a grant to help with the school garden. The grant covered the cost of tan bark and fencing.
“I got plywood from McKinnon Lumber,” she said. “I funded most of it myself.”
She worked with the teacher and students from Club Live to install the native and drought-resistant plants. Club Live is a drug awareness group on campus.
“We held a contest for the club and said if they wanted to build a floor plan (for the garden), they could design one on their own,” Morcate said. “We chose which one to use and held a pizza party and gave movie tickets to the (person whose design) we chose.”
She said the garden includes roses, poppies, daisies and other plants. She said she choose drought-resistant plants because she knew over the summer it would be hard for students or school staff to maintain it.
The hardest part for Morcate was finding the time to complete the project. She had to balance the time she spent on it with classes and playing on the varsity softball team at San Benito High School.
“I had been a Girl Scout for 13 years and I always wanted to get the highest rank,” she said.
She had another motivating factor.
“I have two brothers who are both Boy Scouts,” she said. “My family has a deal that if you get the highest rank, they will help us buy a car. That was one motivation.”
She said she thought the Gold Award would also help when it came to applying for college and to add to a resume. Working on the project also helped her to improve her time management, which has been beneficial in college.
“It helped a lot being able to juggle between multiple tasks,” Morcate said. “Plus, Girl Scouts in general has helped.”
Other Girl Scouts are working on projects to start a cheerleading camp at Anzar High School and to start a club to raise awareness of teen dating violence at San Benito High School. Another student completed a project in 2011 that included rebuilding a wooden stage at Bolado Park.
“It’s the leadership really and the self-reliance, those kind of skills,” Schmidt said, of the reasons the Gold Award project is beneficial. “They should pick a project that interests them that they would want to do whether they were getting a Gold Award or not.”
