About Connecting Youth to Youth Project
Friday, 30 November 2007
I have been working on my Girl Scout Gold Award project, called Connecting Youth to Youth, for the past two years and I’m excited to share it with you all now.
Just as a little background, the Girl Scout Gold Award project is the highest award a Girl Scout can earn (similar to the Eagle Scout Award in Boy Scouts). A Senior Girl Scout can complete her Gold Award by having worked at least sixty hours on her project as well as completing prerequisites before she begins the project work.
For my project, I spent a week in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 2005, filming the Publik Kreativity Drama Krew, a drama group that creates and performs skits, dances, and songs with the idea of raising awareness of AIDS in an engaging and inspiring way. This group is amazing and they are such great actors, dancers, and singers.
I also spent a week in Luebeck, Germany, in December 2005, filming Rebecca, a German friend of mine, and her friends. I got to know Rebecca better, go to school with her, and I got to know lots of her friends very well.
Lastly, I filmed a group of high school students at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, California in June 2006. This was a great experience as well for me considering that these amazing students live so close to me yet are seen as so different because they are deaf.
When I am awarded my Gold Award I plan to have in some way successfully connected all of the groups I filmed with each other as well as the viewers of my documentary with the groups in the documentary. The main reason for my interest in this project is that I want youth my age to be more aware of other youth in other countries. I think youth and people in general would enjoy finding the many similarities they have with others in other countries and cultures and would be able to connect through their similarities. At the same time, youth need to be aware of the differences between everyone. These differences shouldn’t divide and separate people but create awareness of everyone’s uniqueness.