by Adele Hardwick

A Bellbrook troop of Girl Scouts, Bridget Richard, Kate Havlicek, Emily Horne, Kate Barton, and Kristen Cross, are in the constructive phase of their Gold Award to reach their next rank of Ambassadors. Each scout must identify a problem in her community that she wishes to fix then create a plan to develop the issue.

Havlicek realizes the influence that music has upon young people, so her personal goal is to help children around the age of 9 to 11 identify with a broad range of instruments. She believes that this will influence them to be more interested in middle school and high school band programs. Havlicek states, “I will be holding private lessons for the kids to get to know the instruments better. We will be performing band and choir concerts, so the children can develop interest at an earlier age.”

Horne’s goal to educate a younger population of kids about instruments is similar to Havlicek. She decided to go with a different approach of her project. The students in the elementary school will get the opportunity to play the instruments on one day. This will accustom them to the mechanics of each instrument performed in band. Horne stated, “Music should be taught at a younger age, so higher levels of band can compete at a more advanced level. Personally, I wish I had the opportunity to start playing instruments at a younger age.”

Richard discusses her future project which involves a presentation about STEM for women to the parents of Bellbrook High School. In the presentation, Richard will address the strengths of women entering science, technology, engineering and math programs for their future. Richard says, “I will be presenting my project in early of 2015 to the parents of young girls to advocate fields of  the STEM career.”

Cross is passionate about helping others and desires to pursue a path in medicine. She made the decision that she could help make a change now in the world by training an ordinary dog to be a service dog. Cross says, “I will be training two nights a week to learn the way to train a dog to possibly save someone’s life.” She plans for this project to take somewhere around three months to complete and is interested in what the training entails.

Barton is organizing a project of knitting for teens that are suffering from cancer. Her project branches out, so anyone in the entire world will be able to participate. Barton said, “I have contacted a knitting website to ask for their help in accomplishing my project.” She will be donating hats and scarves to teens that have cancer in local hospitals in the area. This project will be a learning experience for Barton since she has never learned how to knit before. Her goal for the project is to find a way to let the teens with cancer know there are people supporting them through their rough time.