Gold Award: Crime Scene Investigation: What it takes to be a Forensic Scientist
The Idea | Gold Award Application | Becoming a Crime Scene Investigator | What is Crime Scene Investigation? | Ride Along | Bloodstain | Trace | Firearms | Fingerprints | DNA | Other cool web pages | About me!

girlscoutlogo.jpg

What is the Gold Award? It is the highest award for a Girl Scout to achieve and has existed almost as long as Girl Scouting itself. First known as The Golden Eaglet, this prestigious award has always been the ultimate achievement for older girls to express thier desire to better thier community. Through the years the name has changed.........you may remember it as the Curved Bar or First Class. But the Gold Award was finally chosen as the permanent name.

goldawardtitlepage.jpg

Even with the name changes the standards have always been very high. Girls who are in grades 9 through 12 are eligible to complete the four preliminary steps and then tackle the Gold Award project itself The first four steps involve the girl in a maturing pftcess so she may develop her interest and skills that she will need in completing the project. These first four steps include earning four Interest Patches on topics that are of great interest to her, exploring careers, performing in a leadership capacity within her troop, school or church, and earning the Girl Scout challenge that focuses on her personal development, relationships, developing values and understanding the Girl Scout movement and sharing it with others.

After she has completed the four preliminary steps she is ready to develop her Gold Award ideas..... meet with the Gold Award Committee for approval and then proceed with the project. The Gold Award Committee works to ensure that each project takes at the very least 50 hours and embraces five common elements: vision, passion, longevity, connection, and community impact.

Vision is about looking within the community and seeing a need--a need that is not being met.

Passion is the difference between doing a project just to get it done and doing a project that comes from the heart.

Longevity provides that the project will have ongoing effects or be able to continue or be repeated after its completion.

The fourth element, connection, is to interact, if at all possible, with those that are being served by the project so that she may see those that are being affected by her work.

And the last element, community impact, ensures that the Gold Award projects go beyond Girl Scouts to affect a community. To accomplish that, a girl must use skills and knowledge learned in Girl Scouting while working with others such as the individual projects she engaged in in completing the first four requirements of the Gold Award process.

After she has completed the project the girl again meets with the Gold Award Committee to review the project and ensure that the planned outcome was reached.