For more than one year, Amanda Oross, a Senior Girl Scout from Troop 11064 in Fleetwood, has been working toward achieving the highest award in Girl Scouts, the Gold Award. This award is earned by only 5 – 6 percent of eligible girl scouts and is comparable to the Eagle Scout Award. Her efforts will be formally recognized when she receives the Girl Scout Gold Award at the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania’s annual Spring Girl Scout Achievement Ceremony.
For Amanda’s project, she started with the goal of improving reading literacy by developing a method to provide readily accessible books to neighborhood communities. She obtained approval from international groups, local municipalities, and public libraries in order to create and install three Little Free Library boxes in the communities of Blandon, Fleetwood, and Kutztown. Little Free Library boxes are free collections of books located in public areas where individuals can “take a book, leave a book.”
She then recruited and led a group of volunteers to collect building materials and books in order to assemble and install the library boxes at Cornerstone Neighborhood, 200 Cornerstone Drive, Blandon; Recreational Area at Tree Tops, 407A Acer Drive, Blandon; and Kutztown, 440 E Main Street in Kutztown, by the children’s playground area and band shell.
Amanda has been active in the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania since kindergarten earning a series of awards, including the Silver and Bronze Awards, for various community service activities. Amanda’s Silver Award involved developing and distributing a series of games and activities to help very young children become interested in and learn about our solar system. Her Bronze Award involved harvesting potatoes that were then donated to local food banks. For many young women, the leadership skills, goal setting, and sense of community and commitment that come from earning the Gold Award set the foundation for a lifetime of active citizenship.
The Gold Award Project goes beyond performing a community service; they encompass organizational, leadership, and networking skills that the young women can carry with them as they strive to become leaders. They are living the Girl Scouts’ mission to build girls and young women of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.
More information is available at www.littlefreelibrary.org and www.gsep.org.
