Due to her grit and perseverance, sophomore Emily Paseos was recently awarded the Girl Scouts Gold Award for creating a passport program for children at the Polish Center in Chicopee, Mass., which solved the one problem that she faced growing up: boredom and complaints.
Growing up, Emily and her family would visit this Polish Center for tours. Experiencing boredom and waiting for hours, looking at the same bland walls, she wanted to make a change. “You have a standard passport,” Emily said, “but I redesigned the inside. As you go through the museum, each room has a page with an activity that corresponds to it.” Some of the activities that she incorporated into the passports were coloring pages, stickers, and finding certain objects in the museum that not only would channel the kids’ boredom into something else, but also teach them something that they could take away from the museum.
The Gold Award is the highest form of recognition and honor in Girl Scouting; therefore, the journey Emily had to make her project come to life was not easy. The minimum requirement to get the award was at least 80 hours, but Emily exceeded the necessary hours by completing at least 120. “Much time was spent researching different things in the museum and then finding ways to print the passport,” she said. “It was a lot of funding and figuring out how to get all that material in a less costly way.”
On top of making sure that her whole project was self-sustainable, some other challenges she faced were translating the Polish labels of each display to English and making agreements with the museum to help her fund her impact on their community. She also had to make sure that the color pages weren’t reliant on color so that even those with colorblindness could have the same experience as other kids.
With the help of her main mentor provided by Girl Scouts and with the support of her Girl Scout Troop Leader, she was able to make this project come to life.
Through this experience, not only did Emily impact the Polish community, but she also learned more about herself in ways she didn’t expect. She noted that she developed a range of skills through working on this project. “The big thing you learn by doing a Gold Award is leadership, communication, and organization,” she said. “I’m not usually one to do a lot of public speaking, but for this project, I often found myself in a room with 30 or 40 kids and parents, and I had to talk at them. It also taught me that there are a lot of steps to being a leader.”
Through this project and her success, she learned more about her heritage when she was creating the activities, and more about her community as she was trying to make the pages in the passport enjoyable for kids aged 5-16 years old.
I think we can all agree that Emily has come so far, and this project is just one step to achieving more. I cannot wait to see what she accomplishes in the future.
