Gold Award spotlight: Girl Scout's garden helps families in need

While volunteering at St. Winifred’s Food Pantry, Ambassador Girl Scout Kaitlyn Burkhart noticed a shortage of fresh fruits and vegetables. That gave her an idea that grew into her Gold Award project–a community garden dedicated to supporting the food pantry.

“With the rising prices of food, especially produce, many stores are unwilling to donate fresh produce to food pantries,” Kaitlyn explains. “I want to give families something other than canned vegetables.”

She worked with food pantry staff and volunteers to build a community garden, called the Common Ground Garden, to meet the needs of the growing number of families who depend upon the food pantry. More than 550 families rely on the pantry each year for food and other necessities.

Kaitlyn Burkhart

Kaitlyn’s team included members of her church and high school, who volunteered their time to make garden stakes and prepare the garden. She also worked closely with her grandfather, who gave her his unused garden plot and provided her garden with water.

After more than 87 hours of planning, planting and nurturing, Kaitlyn’s garden provided almost 200 pounds of fresh vegetables last summer. She grew green and yellow peppers, broccoli, eggplant, zucchini and cucumbers. Kaitlyn also created a cookbook for the food pantry families featuring the vegetables grown in the garden.

As part of every Gold Award project, Girl Scouts are required to look at how their project can be sustained over time. Kaitlyn’s leadership skills ensured that the garden will continue to grow with care from her high school’s garden club and church volunteers, as well as provide families with delicious, affordable ways to prepare fresh vegetables.

Kaitlyn is the daughter of Wendy and Scott Burkhart, of Pittsburgh. She is a senior at Keystone Oaks High School.

Common Ground Garden

More information about the Girl Scout Gold Award is available at gswpa.org/go-gold. Learn about the Gold Award's 100th anniversary at gswpa.org/highest-award.

Gold Award spotlight: Girl Scout's take-action project goes downhill

To earn her Gold Award, Jessica Friss created a take-action project to solve a problem in her community—not only in the short term, but for years into the future.

A Girl Scout is encouraged to use her values and skills to choose a community issue that she cares about. Jessica's Gold Award project addressed the issue of rainwater runoff at a trail head in Mount Washington, located at the bottom of two steep hills on the corner of Republic and Fingal Streets.

The water flowing quickly downhill was damaging a local roadway. To remedy this, Jessica set out to create a rain garden capture the water as it flowed off the steep streets.

Jessica Friss

A rain garden is a shallow depression that is planted with deep-rooted native plants and grasses which allows rainwater runoff from impervious urban areas—like roofs, driveways, walkways, parking lots, and compacted lawn areas—to be absorbed.

Jessica met with Mount Washington Community Development Corporation (MWCDC) and StormWorks, a local rainwater management company, to help design the best type of rain garden for the site.

She then organized separate digging and planting events through the WMCDC. She went door-to-door on the surrounding streets to recruit volunteers for the events and to educate neighbors about the rain garden.

More than 20 volunteers helped on the first day of digging, completing the base of the rain garden and smaller overflow garden. Later that summer, volunteers filled the garden with dirt and planted native perennials that were deer resistant and could withstand large amounts of water that could contain salt and other contaminates from the road.

She also created and distributed brochures about the project and spoke at an event held at the Mt. Washington Carnegie Library.

Jessica's rain garden not only addressed the deterioration of the roadway, it also helped filter the polluted runoff water and provided a beautiful garden for the neighborhood.

Gold benefits

Gold Award projects help communities and give girls important leadership skills, teaching them to seek out the work that needs doing in the world.

There are other benefits to "going Gold" as well. Some universities and colleges offer scholarships unique to Gold Award recipients, and girls who enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces may receive advanced rank in recognition of their achievements.

More information about the Girl Scout Gold Award is available at gswpa.org/go-gold. Learn about the Gold Award's 100th anniversary at gswpa.org/highest-award.