First Steps:

The steps below may be completed in any order, but must be completed before beginning the final project.  All of this must be done after you are registered as a Senior Girl Scout.

1.  Earn the Career Exploration pin

2.  Earn the Senior Girl Scout Leadership Award

3.  Earn the Senior Girl Scout Challenge

4.  Earn four Interest Project Patches

5.  Plan and carry out your Gold Award project
 

One of the unique things about the Gold Award is that before you start on the Interest Project Patches you should have an idea what general direction your project will take.
 

**Helpful Hint**

Some of the IPPs lend themselves to almost any project and are truly helpful when it comes time to implement your final project.  These are:
        ** Conflict Resolution
          ** It's About Time
          ** Computers in Everyday Life
          ** Do You Get the Message?
          ** Public Relations
          ** Emergency Preparedness
          ** Media Savvy

All of these are the type of IPP that you might need to put on a large project, especially if you have to work with others and communicate to people what you are doing.

Planning the Project:

The project needs to meet several criteria

Must meet an expressed need in the girl's community - may be outside of Girl Scouting or within the Girl Scout Movement as a whole.  Working within a limited area such as a service unit or troop is more appropriate for leadership hours, rather than a Gold Award.

You are encouraged to go beyond the Girl Scouting community.  If you choose a project within the Girl Scouting community some segment of the project must involve the community at large such as resource people, ongoing helpers, final use, etc.

The applicantmust design, develop and carry out the project.  She may use other Girl Scouts to help, but she must be able to identify her own contributions from beginning to end.

One or more girls may coordinate a project together, but each girl must identify her contribution from beginning to end.

The design and implementation of the project should reflect the very best work of which the girl is capable.

You must select a project advisor, including someone with experience in the area you choose to highlight.

You must consider funding, create a budget and decide how that budget will be met.

If your project is ongoing, such as a nature trail, hotline or web page, you must plan for maintenance after you are through.

The Gold Award Project work will span at least a 50 hour period from conception to completed project.

Do not begin your project until you have heard from the Gold Award Committee that it is OK to do so.

What Others have Done:

The following have been submitted by leaders and girls around the country.  Remember that the girl is doing a project *to the best of her ability*.  Talents and abilities can be very wide ranging.

Note that not every project listed below would be accepted by every council as a Gold Award Project.  But feel free to use the ideas as a jumping off point for your own project.

Life Skills:
-I saw in our local paper that a girl collected stuffed animals and gave them to a police station
-An after school fun club for neighborhood children
-Doing something to help out at the local women's shelter, crisis pregnancy or Senior center.
-Helping seniors with a certain home repair.
-Adopt a mother and child for Christmas
-One girl with Bolivian parents did a school supplies drive for Bolivian children in the
highlands who have almost nothing. She collaborated with a Bolivian women's' club here toarrange to get the supplies flown down there.
-Building a storage bin for the service unit.
-One girl designed and made a sturdy oak bridge (about 6' long) for our SU's use in bridgingceremonies. It comes apart for storage and is easy to put together. She also wrote abooklet on bridging that stays with the bridge for ideas for leaders. It's really beautiful and has gotten quite a bit of use. Our troop donated money to build it as our legacy to the SU for our 12 years of existence. A brass plaque on the bridge says so!

Nature, Science and Health:
-Planted an Indiana wildflower garden in the nature center of a local elementary
school. Also developed realted outdoor activities for the center director to use with
students visiting the garden.
-Organized a bone marrow typing drive that specially targeted the Asian population,
 which is underrepresented in the blood bank
-Involve your community in an endeavor to clean up a polluted area
-Developing a web site (my daughter is doing that for her Gold for her little sister's elementary school)
-"Save a Sweet-Heart," an anti-smoking campaign held on her school campus.
-One who was a 2nd degree black belt in Tang Soo Do taught a women's class in
self-defense.
-Four workshops for Juniors that illustrated important concepts in science. The
stations included hands-on experiments and projects to educate and stimulate the girls'
interest. The workshops were: creating silly-putty (illustrating chemical change and
polymers), building molecular models, making goo-yuck (illustrating physical change),
coordinating their own experiments ( to understand the relationship between birds' anatomyand birds' food choices), chromatograpyh (which showed the different rate of movement forcolors), and participating in relays. This project showed the girls that they can have a lot offun with science, that they are all capable of understanding some "difficult" scientificconcepts and that chemistry, biology and physics are interesting, and are all around them intheir everyday lives.
-Repairing a troop house and making it to safety wise standards.
-One idea is to put on a web page for your council or service unit
-One girl got her high school into recycling. She picked up over a ton of recyclable paperover the year by putting bins in each classroom and training teachers, etc. When she
graduated, she had made arrangements for the local disposal company to take over
- Two girls relandscaped a major planting area at their high school. Involved upgrading theirrigation, consulting with a landscape architect, getting donations of soil and plants, etc.
-Two girls put on an Outdoor Skills Camporee for Juniors which will lead them into the
Council-wide camporee when they are Cadettes & Seniors. 6 competitive events, prizes,etc. Really forced a lot of non-outdoors leaders to get out there in a very do-able way. ThisCamporee has become an annual SU event.
-Developing a new trail at a camp
-Planting and caring for an herbal garden at the local park.
-Wild Animal rehabilitation in Howell Nature Center
-Doing something at the Humane Society
-Planning an Outdoor Skills day for children in your community.
-Getting donations and workers to improve your local park.
-Create and implement an erosion prevention plan for a favorite park or hiking trail,
     with help from a soil conservation agency
- Develop activity kits for hospitalized children with extended care needs
-Started the "Fullbright Elementary School Girls After-School Program." The program
addresses the issue of getting at-risk girls to stay in school. The girls, ages 10 - 12
participated in a variety of activities each week to help boost their self-esteem.
-My project titled "Be Prepared, the Next Generation" entails training approximately
100 high school students in First Aid and Community CPR.
-One project was to make various sized quilts to give to people who donate white blood
cell platelets, because these people get cold during the 2-hour process. Also had enought to deliver to Pediatrict AIDS center.
-Presented a workshop (Abuse and You, You Could be a Victim) for Cadettes, Seniors
and adults to learn about preventing or handling abusive situations.
-Worked with Tree People to inform Cadettes of trees in the enviornment and society.
Girls had hands-on workshops with Tree People.
-Presented a series of games and workshops utilizing sensory experiences to show girlsfirst-hand what it is like to be disabled.

Communications:
-Organize a fair to help people identify volunteer opportunities in the community.
-Create a directory of organizations that use volunteers
-Created a database for her Council's Gold Award recipients called the "Gold Award
Alliance" and promoted it - (questionable in our council but would be a Silver Award
project)
-Compiled information on adoption. Interviewed and recorded thoughts from adoptees.
Included different points of view about what choices an expectant mother has. Shared
her project with residents of local home for unwed mothers.
 -Write and produce a play that causes people to think about a community problem and
to change either themselves or their surroundings to solve the problem

The Arts and History:
-A girl designed the Children's corner to completion in a newly remodeled town library.
That is something that will also last.
- Sewed handbags for residents of the Indiana Girls School (a correctional facility for
juvenile offenders). She included items like perfume, soap, and hair ribbons in each
bag.
-Organize an historical walking tour around the community, using checkpoints and an
interpretive map
-Created a song book and tape of traditional Buddhist songs used for funerals and
other special occasions
-Plan and coordinate a school or community event that celebrates different cultures
through art, dance, song, costume, and food
-One taught Girl Scout leaders how to play guitar, "I want all of the younger girls to
have the same loving memories of singing with my troop that I do."
-One used her interest in photography to put together a slide show with narration about
our resident camp and the wildlife and plant life located there.
-Planned and held an animation art workshop for Juniors and 3rd grade Brownies.
There were sessions on character design, attitudes and expressions, storyboards, zoetropl,flipbooks and thaumatropl.
-One chose 2 children's stories and re-wrote them into stage plays. With a group of 10
girls ranging in age from 7 to 16, chose parts, memorized lines and practiced, practiced, practiced. With the help of her troop painted the scenery and made the props for the play and then took it on the road to several pre-school and Kindergarten classes around the Valley.
-Wrote a play designed to teach young children about life as an African American girl
in the late 1900's. She used her work to develop an interactive program to be
presented by a local group of historical performers.

Sports and Recreation:
-Organizing a day camp and carrying it out for underprivileged youth
-Set up a Father/Daughter camp weekend
-Organize a Seniors' (citizens) Prom
-Served in a group home by cooking and preparing special events like barbeques for
the children, also prepared food for the homeless and worked on a food drive and helpedwith programs for Christmas.
-Collected donations of clothes, sports equipment, games and toys for the "at-risk"
teens at a Children's Shelter.
-My daughter, for her Gold Award Project, worked with a stable that specialized in
working with handicapped kids. She shared with them the requirements for the Horse LoverBadge, then recruited a group of kids to work with her, who were trained by the stable.
Then she made contact with a challenged Girl Scout troop and worked with them to earnthat badge.
-Work with people in your community government to develop a recreational bicycle
route

Miscellaneous:

-Thanksgiving Dinner for Senior Citizens. Every year the high school students put on a
thanksgiving feast for Senior Citizens. For years, there was a fee. Then a Senior GS
decided that it should be FREE. She got everyone's help (including mine in making
centerpieces) to donate items and services. That Dinner is still free and has been going on for free for 4 years now.
 -Start a group at school for victims of violence, after recruiting adults to assist as
 advisers
-Organize a drive to collect used radios, and establish a place where the homeless can
obtain free radios, batteries and headsets
-Help a new library with cataloging of books, organizing and decorating the children's
area, etc
-Plan a workshop for community members (topic should not support a political campaign or specific group)
-Collect over 200 Japanese books for the Public Library and produced a children's
video to compliment the project
-Led a research project which assessed the needs of middle school students during
after school hours, and helped design an innovative youth directed program
-Beautified a park by building new fences and map scales, and making plant
identification signs. She also helped two Brownie troops earn their "Outdoor
Happenings" try-it
-Planned a one week outreach day camp in her neighborhood for over 110 children,
and compiled a Day Camp Manual to guide future Day Camp Directors (questionable
in our council unless it was a non-Girl Scout camp)
-Designed activity boxes on ecology, eco-action and wildlife. They were designed
around the estuary ecosystem with marshlands and wildlife at Alum Rock Park
-Developed a native plants education program including a resource binder
-Working with a historical museum, landscaped an urban garden
-Organized and produced an outreach dinner at Christmas for sixty-eight Senior
citizens
-Organized and directed a day camp for a church, shelter or other organization
-Organize a youth environmental program in a local church group and started a recycling program
-Organize the archives of the Campbell Historical Museum, sorted papers and
booklets and filed them
-Sewed clothing for children to be donated to Temporary Aide Center. Sewed over 50
outfits.
-Added a large butterfly garden to a local park that had no flowers. She researched
the plants, got donations from local garden centers, built butterfly roosting houses.
-Sewed costumes for an elementary school's Pioneer Week activities. Researched
patterns with local historical group, and got donations to cover cost of materials.
-Moved a wildflower trail at one of our local camps. This trail was being threatened by
the development of a new housing addition.