Lynnfield Girl Scouts Receive Gold Award

The following is an announcement from Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts:

Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts is proud to announce that Lynnfield Girl Scouts Carleen Craffey and Kaitlin McKenzie received their Girl Scout Gold Award pins on Wednesday, June 20 at a ceremony at the Boxborough Holiday Inn. The event was attended by family, friends and Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts' CEO, Ruth N. Bramson, and Board President, Peggy Stevens.

The Girl Scout Gold Award is the highest award that a Girl Scout can achieve, and it recognizes a service project that fulfills a need within a girl's community whether local or global, creates change, and becomes ongoing. To earn the award, girls must complete the Silver Award and a minimum of 80 hours of service. The project is more than a good service project—it encompasses organizational, leadership, and networking skills. Just five percent, approximately, of all Girl Scouts earn this award each year.

Craffey’s Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, raised awareness about reducing the amount of waste people create, and shared ideas for how to reuse items, including how to create works of art from recycled materials. Craffey ran a book drive, collecting gently used books and donating them to hospitalized children. She also wrote newspaper articles, started a facebook page, and created an educational video that airs on the local access cable station. To ensure her project’s sustainability, she worked with members of Lynnfield High School’s POWR group and Recycling Committee to maintain the facebook page, book drive, and awareness efforts.

McKenzie’s project, Helping Children in Need, utilized the work of Dare Family Services, which provides foster homes to abused and neglected children in Massachusetts. The organization has struggled to recruit a sufficient number of new foster families to keep up with the need, and saw an opportunity to improve the activities available to children who were waiting for their foster parents to get out of a meeting. McKenzie collected books, toys and journals for the waiting room, she researched the need for foster parents on the national and state levels and created an advertisement to help raise awareness about this need locally. Community members and Girl Scout troops in the area will continue to supply the waiting room with items, and personnel at the Dare office will update and distribute the advertising materials.