CONTRIBUTED PHOTOS
[quote style=”2″]Girl Scout Gold Award Presented to 3 Local Members[/quote]
In the Olympics, to “go for the gold” means to work hard to be the best in your chosen sport. The same can be said in Girl Scouts.
Three local members of the organization have achieved the highest recognition a Girl Scout can earn, the Girl Scout Gold Award, an honor that fewer than one of every hundred girls in Girl Scouting earn. The accomplishment requires that they put together the leadership and communication skills they have acquired through Girl Scout activities to plan, organize and lead a service project that addresses an unfilled need in the community and/or beyond.
“I chose my project because I wanted to be able to help the kids during their time of need,” said Allison. By completing her project, Allison wanted to “make sure the kids had everything they needed for when they come into the shelter.”
Sisters Andrea and Sofia Gispert Tello of Hermiston created basic computer and social media skills classes for senior citizens that they titled Seniors Get Techie.
“I chose to pursue the project Seniors Get Techie, because I saw the big need of the senior citizen members in our community had to learn about technology,” said Andrea. “I wanted to show them that I appreciate them as very important members of our community and I wanted to be able to give back using my skills.”
Sofia said she gained valuable leadership skills while working on the project, including how to adapt her plans to her chosen audience.
“I truly was amazed by how big the gap was between senior citizens understanding of the technological world that shapes current society and people of my generation,” she explained. “Through my students, I was able to reassess the needs of the group and restructure my classes to introduce them more smoothly into the skills I taught.”
Allison agreed that working on her Gold Award project helped her to “refine my leadership skills.”
The Seniors Get Techie classes are available as a PowerPoint presentation on cd and can be checked out at the Hermiston Public Library.
Allison graduated last June from Pendleton High School and is now majoring in elementary education at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. Andrea and Sofia also graduated last June, from Hermiston High School. Sofia is attending Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., where she is studying Japanese, with plans to enter law school in the future. Andrea is at New York University Shanghai where she intends to major in neuroscience.
