Family celebrates three Gold Award Girl Scouts
November 08, 2024
Girl Scouting is a family tradition in the Vestal household, and now that tradition has reached a new level, with three sisters earning the Gold Award, the highest award in Girl Scouting. Caroline Vestal recently earned the award, joining her twin sister Lucy and older sister Molly as Gold Award Girl Scouts.
Over the past four years, the sisters have channeled their passion into projects that have made a difference in their community and beyond. Caroline earned her Gold Award last year after completing a project to increase awareness about period poverty and stigma. In 2022, Lucy earned a Gold Award for helping middle school girls become more confident and develop positive relationships with other girls. Molly’s project aimed to help seniors with technology, earning her a Gold Award in 2021.
Having triple Gold awards in the family is a gratifying achievement for the sisters. However, they never made a pact for all of them to earn one – it just happened, they said. “I think it’s really cool,” said Lucy. “It made us feel closer and super motivated. And it was awesome to have my sister (Molly) as a role model. The Gold Award is a huge learning experience. Hopefully, we can inspire others to do it.”
The sisters have been Girl Scouts since kindergarten, following the path of their paternal grandmother and their mother, Jenny Vestal. The girls say their grandmother, a lifelong Girl Scout, always talks about the fun times she had as a Girl Scout, which has influenced their Girl Scouting experiences. To this day, their grandmother still has fun with her former troopmates through periodic reunions. Just last year, she and her friends met and made s’mores over a firepit.
Caroline's Gold Award
For Caroline, pursuing her Gold Award started in ninth grade. That is when she first began thinking about project ideas. Then, in 10th grade, she learned about period poverty through the menstrual equity club at her school, which held a period supply drive. She realized that many people did not know poverty and stigma existed. It motivated her to find a solution.
Because she wanted to do so many things, Caroline took a multi-prong approach to her project. She organized a period product drive and donated the products to the Star of Hope homeless shelter. She also collaborated with her church to give a PowerPoint presentation on period poverty and education at a women's summit. After the presentation, she led a sewing session to teach participants how to make reusable pads from fabric. The reusable pads were donated to a women's center in Uganda in coordination with the Girls for Girls organization with Lighting the Path.
Caroline then teamed up with the school nurse at Kolter Elementary School to educate fifth-grade girls about the issue of period stigma. She created fun information cards with positive messages and uplifting quotes and gave them to the 60 students who attended the presentation.
“I learned so much from my project. I feel like I learned how to organize my thoughts and ideas into common goals and to put my thoughts into action,” Caroline said. “It also made me more comfortable speaking in front of people. I learned that I like speaking in public and presenting information about something I care about.”
Lucy's Gold Award
Passionate about promoting self-love, Lucy’s project helped 17 middle school girls build selfconfidence and learn how to create meaningful relationships with other girls. She designed a Girls Who Thrive website with uplifting videos she wrote and produced. The website also includes TED talks, books, movies, and documentaries as resources. She also hosted a forum with her team of volunteers, and they led small group sessions with the girls.
“I learned that I could make things happen if I stay motivated. I alsolearned the importance of being organized and that there is a lot of planning behind the scenes. I know now what project management looks like, and I got better at talking to adults," she said.
Lucy and Caroline, who both graduated from Bellaire High School in May 2024, said having a sister who had gone through the Gold Award process was helpful. They said Molly gave them valuable tips, such as wording to use on the Gold Award application and keeping a flexible timeline. But Molly said she was simply a cheerleader, encouraging her sisters from the sidelines. The twins did all the work from beginning to end, and they did it while taking challenging classes and participating in extracurricular activities, she said.
Molly's Gold Award
Molly's inspiration for her Gold Award was her grandmother, who sought technology advice. “She would call me constantly asking questions like how to text and connect to Wi-Fi,” said Molly, now studying at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “I love it when she calls me, but I prefer the calls not to be about technology.”
Molly created a booklet for the residents at her grandmother's retirement home. The booklet teaches seniors how to use technology and empowers them to be more independent and confident using it. To develop the content, Molly worked with the retirement home staff to create a survey to determine the top technology issues that seniors faced. She used the results to create relevant content for the booklet.
She distributed the large-print booklets to her grandmother’s retirement home and two other retirement homes. The booklets are now included in the retirement homes’ welcome packages. In addition, she conducted small group presentations while observing COVID-19 protocols. Her demonstration on how to enlarge the font size on cellphones was a big hit among the residents, she said.
Molly, who is majoring in religion and history, said the Gold Award process taught her several valuable skills, such as time management, goal setting, and leadership. These skills have helped her balance classes and college life. “I also learned how to better address issues in my community. If I see something, I am fully capable of addressing it,” she said.
Jenny Vestal said she is “extremely proud” of her daughters, calling their projects labors of love. “We’ve been planning and working on earning Gold Awards for the past four years, so it’s quite a milestone," Vestal said. “And I especially love how each project was so different, and they were all entirely independent of each other.”
