[00:00:00] Walter: The Hearts of Gold Podcast is brought to you by the Grow and Share Network, produced by off the Walter Media Productions.
[00:00:14] Sheryl: Welcome to Hearts of Gold. Today I have Haley with us. Hi Haley.
[00:00:18] Haley: Hi so my gold award project was Gaia’s passion. It’s an environmental organization that I created. Every month we do a different either workshop or an event. We also did monthly presentations on different environmental topics. Some of the things we’ve done are how to shop sustainably, how to conserve water in your home.
[00:00:36] And we also participated at the local community market. We gave away bags and I plan to do some raffles in the future where we can give away some reusable products.
[00:00:45] Sheryl: What prompted this project?
[00:00:48] Haley: So this actually started from another club that I’m in. It’s called Youth Leadership Nassau. In this club, you’re broken up into different groups and each group is going to shackle a social issue.
[00:00:57] And our issue was environmentalism. So for our project s what we were doing a school beautification at one of the high schools and I got inspiration from that. I actually used my Gold Award to partner with the youth leadership nasa. And that was both our Youth Leadership Nassau Project and the first project for My Gold Award.
[00:01:14] And from there it stemmed off into its own thing.
[00:01:17] Sheryl: What did it stem off into? What other pieces did it become?
[00:01:21] Haley: From there, we created our own social medias. We had a Facebook and an Instagram. We had different workshops such as composting, and we also planted flowers around the town to help spread biodiversity.
[00:01:33] Sheryl: What kind of feedback did you get from your community?
[00:01:36] Haley: The community members who were able to participate really loved it, but I did definitely struggle getting people to participate. But every time people came, I had a super positive reviews. We got five stars on our Facebook consistently. It was really great.
[00:01:50] Sheryl: What prompted your interest in environmental awareness?
[00:01:54] Haley: I was super into nature as a kid. Me and my papa would always go and walks in the woods. I always loved like taking dirt and stuff and like planting flowers. I had my own little light garden in the back of our backyard. So it’s always been a huge part of my life.
[00:02:09] My grandma literally had like her own botanical gardens in her backyard. It was my favorite thing.
[00:02:15] Sheryl: What surprised you, or did you learn that while you were going through your project about the environment that you didn’t know beforehand?
[00:02:22] Haley: Okay, so this is actually something that came from Keep Nassau Beautiful, but I believe it’s every month or so you actually drink an entire credit card worth of plastic from the amount of my plastics that are in the ocean.
[00:02:34] This actually inspired an essay that I did for my literature class about plastic in our oceans.
[00:02:40] Sheryl: I saw on your social, another series that you did was on Hispanic environmentalists. How did that piece come about and what did you learn?
[00:02:49] Haley: So my goal was each month to work with the diversity months, like Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and feature environmentalism from those different minorities, and I plan to continue doing that in the future.
[00:03:01] Sheryl: What was your biggest challenge during your Gold Award project, and how did you overcome it?
[00:03:05] Haley: Both working with high schoolers and then trying to get high schoolers to come to my events. So my team for this was actually a lot of my friends from high school weren’t a bunch of other clubs. A lot of us are in leadership, so I thought that they would be perfect for the job, but because they were in so many other things and they were super over, it was really hard to get all of us on the same schedule to get done.
[00:03:27] And then another problem was getting people to actually attend the events. No matter how much I share them on social media or had my friends share it or put up posters in school, it’s always felt like I was struggling to get people to come in. I never really did find out a great solution for this.
[00:03:42] It was always just like word of mouth, like sometimes even dragging people there. But once people like came and saw that they enjoyed it, they, they were able to invite other people too, and we ended up having a good turnout by the end of it.
[00:03:54] Sheryl: A piece of the gold award process is data measurement. What was your measurement piece and what were the results?.
[00:04:03] Haley: Throughout this project, I made our Facebook and our Instagram business accounts, so I was able to track how many people were viewing and liking, sharing all of our posts. And I used that a lot to track how well our informational posts were doing. I also conducted a couple surveys throughout our project to see how many people were coming, what they felt that they were learning.
[00:04:25] If they were gaining anything from the presentations we were doing, if they would recommend them with friends, and I used all of that information within my final presentation.
[00:04:34] Sheryl: What was your favorite part of your project and why?
[00:04:37] Haley: Definitely the school beautification. That was our first event. We had the most people show up.
[00:04:42] I met a lot of really cool people who I still talk to today were literally from my school, had never met them, but they were super nice. They came out and supported me and they have come to a bunch of other events too, and it was really just a great networking experience for myself. And I was able to get I think about six plants at in front of our courtyard that are still there and alive today.
[00:05:01] Sheryl: Who is your project advisor and how did you find them?
[00:05:05] Haley: Tracy Branson. She was an environmental teacher at the school and actually head of the environmental science department. I found her literally through asking my principal, asking around like, who do you think would be the best for this project here at the school?
[00:05:17] I definitely wanted to go with someone from my school. She ended up having to step down from the position cause she got too busy. So my second advisor was Meredith Cohen. She’s a social worker at a school. She has helped plan a lot of the events at the club at, at the school, and she has also helped run a few clubs at the school.
[00:05:34] She’s done like huge bulletins for mental health awareness and even some like setups in the cafeteria and huge banners and stuff. She’s been super helpful during the process.
[00:05:43] Sheryl: That’s very interesting that you had to change project advisors during your project. Did you see a change in your project between with your first project advisor and your second project advisor?
[00:05:53] Haley: Under Tracy, she was amazing, but it was really hard to get into contact with her. I actually only had her school email and the email for, or the phone number for the school. So getting in contact with her over the summer was nearly impossible. But once I switched over to Miss Meredith, I have known her literally since sixth grade, so we have a lot more personal connection and I was able to get into contact with her a lot more.
[00:06:17] Easily and that made the project flow a lot smoother from the second half.
[00:06:20] Sheryl: What did you learn about the Gold Award process itself as you went through that you didn’t know that might be helpful for Future Gold Award Girl Scouts?
[00:06:28] Haley: So I didn’t know that your social media can actually count for your national or global impact.
[00:06:35] So let me paint you a little picture. It was a holiday and the people at the council were obviously on. And I’m scrolling through the, like, present, like what you should include in your presentations, and I see national or global impact. I’m like, Hmm, I forgot about that one. So naturally I panic and I send a few frantic emails to the people at Gateway Council and I’m like, Hey, I have a plan.
[00:06:58] How soon does this need to be in action? And I don’t get a response until a couple days later. And they respond saying, oh, you can just use your social media as your national impact. You don’t have to do a whole other thing. And I was like, well, it’s a little too late for that. So I ended up writing a coloring and activity book for kids.
[00:07:15] It’s got like pages with like informational stuff and coloring and some activities based around environmentalism.
[00:07:23] Sheryl: Very cool. Who else was on your team? You mentioned some high school teammates. Who else had a big impact on your project that you wouldn’t have been able to complete it without?
[00:07:33] Haley: My troop leaders were definitely amazing.
[00:07:35] They weren’t technically like a part of my team, but they were a huge help. They got me so many contacts. I literally would not have been able to make the project have as big of an impact as I did without them. They were able to get me contacts for the library, and I used that as a venue. A couple times they got me in contact with Joel Pace, who gave me a spot at the fair so I could advertise.
[00:07:58] My organization and they also got me in contact with the Callahan Community market and I was able to get a booth there to advertise and give out bags as well.
[00:08:06] Sheryl: Circling back to your social media, oftentimes Girl Scouts will create social media for their projects and don’t use it to its full advantage.
[00:08:16] Your account is extensive. What did you learn about social media and how to promote your gold Award project? That might be helpful to others?
[00:08:26] Haley: I’ve actually been working with social media for a very long time. I’ve used social media to promote my own art. I’ve also I am the social media manager for a couple of clubs here, so I definitely have some experience.
[00:08:37] I will say Canva is your best friend. It’s what I used to make. All of my flyers, my presentations, literally everything, even the logo for my organization was made through Canva. So if you’re ever stuck in a rut and you can’t figure out like how you format things or what you wanna do, Canva is the place to go.
[00:08:54] Even when I was like, Stuck about like, I don’t know what I want the presentation to be on this month. I would literally go on Canva and like scroll through their presentations as I would actually find inspiration on there for what to do.
[00:09:06] Sheryl: What are you planning on for your future?
[00:09:08] Haley: So for this project, I plan to pass it down to one of the younger girls in my Samantha Waltman.
[00:09:13] She’ll take it on from there and create her own team. I’m also working. Associate’s degree in high school. I hope to finish that by the time I graduate. And then from there, go on university where I’ll major as a stage manager and minor in marketing.
[00:09:26] Sheryl: What other Girl Scout experiences have you had you’d like to share?
[00:09:30] Haley: My favorite thing was a kid is I would do the week long camps at cateri. I loved it so much. I met so many cool people there and there was actually a group of like five girls and somehow without even contacting each other, we ended up at the same camp three years in a row. We became like best friends for those years.
[00:09:48] So it was definitely great and we ended up hanging out outside of these camps eventually, and I’m definitely have made some friends for life through those.
[00:09:55] Sheryl: You talk about your camp friends. I know that you have a couple of troop sisters that you’ve been very close to. Can you tell us about your troop experience?
[00:10:04] Haley: We’ve always been a really tiny troop, like never more than 10 members. So I’ve been close with these girls for a while. I’ve been in Girl Scouts for almost a decade. Me, my friends Bonnie and Sam have literally been there since the beginning. My friends Bonnie, my friend Bonnie’s mom, actually started the troop.
[00:10:19] So it has literally been us three till the end. We are the members and we are super proud of it.
[00:10:25] Sheryl: What do you think has made it so that you guys stayed so close and continued in Girl Scouts through high school?
[00:10:32] Haley: I think it’s because we were able to make that connection at such a young age. I noticed with a lot of troops, the reason a lot of girls drop out is because they don’t see a point to Girl Scouts anymore, because eventually the badges, you just don’t really connect with them.
[00:10:48] But because I had those great friends, I was able to stay in Girl Scouts and find stuff that I really enjoyed.
[00:10:54] Sheryl: How do you make your s’mores?
[00:10:56] Haley: I take a Reese’s instead of a Hershy bar. I make it with a Reese’s, but my Papa, he makes them with the samoas Girl Scout cookie and sandwiches, the marshmallow between the cookies.
[00:11:06] Sheryl: Sounds delicious. I’m hungry. Well, thanks for joining us today.
[00:11:10] You’re welcome.
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[00:11:23] Walter: The Hearts of Gold Podcast is brought to you by the Grow and Share Network, produced by off the Walter Media Productions.
[00:11:30] Thank you for listening and spreading the word on what we do. If you want to share your story of how you earned your goal award, reach out and send an email to growandshare@outlook.com. Be sure to listen to the newest episodes on your favorite podcast app, as well as view the full video episodes on youtube.com/SherylmRobinson.
[00:11:51] That’s youtube.com/Sheryl, the letter m, Robinson. Take care and we’ll see you next time.