Top award in sight for two more local Girl Scouts

Jul 16, 2023

By combining their individual passions with community service, two more local Girl Scouts have completed the requirements to earn their Gold Award.

The Gold Award is the highest achievement within the Girl Scouts organization, comparable with the Eagle Scout award.

Oneonta residents and Girl Scout Troop 30296 members Leighton Eastman, 18, and Tiffany Gardner, 18, are freshman at SUNY Oneonta, both studying early childhood education.

Scouts since kindergarten, they said Wednesday, Aug. 30 that they enjoyed the camaraderie formed during troop activities and camping trips as well as the opportunities for community service and helping with younger scouts.

Eastman’s Gold Award project, Caring Versus Stealing Wildlife, involved public education on how and when to help wild animals.

She created a pamphlet with common signs of injury and illness, what to do if animals are trapped in manmade materials like netting or fishing line, how to react to orphaned animals and links to social media pages and a website that she created herself.

She placed the informative pamphlets around town and at different campsites, she said, but the online resources broaden the reach of her project.

“People not even just in Oneonta and the area but the whole state can access it,” Eastman said. “It shows you how to contact a wildlife rehabilitator once you are on the website and the social media pages, so that you can get the animal the help it needs.”

Her adult adviser was Suzanne Johnson, her third and fifth grade teacher at Riverside Elementary School and a wildlife rehabilitator who inspired her project, she said.

“She always brought her animals into class,” Eastman said, “and would let us feed the birds and stuff, which I’ve always thought was fun. She was telling me how the Department of Environmental Conservation really needs these sorts of resources for people to access, so they can know when an animal needs to be sent to a professional.”

Johnson said Wednesday she’s “proud and grateful” that Eastman did her project around human interaction around wildlife.

“What she did is a real public service,” Johnson said. “It was always my hope that my students would end up really caring about conserving the environment.”

She said that there was no good overall web resource for people to access when they encountered injured wildlife and they would spend a lot of time searching all over the internet.

By creating a one-stop online resource, “the scope of what she did is really huge,” Johnson said.

Gardner, a longtime dancer at Jillian’s Dance Arts, lead dance workshops for people with disabilities for her Gold Award project, called A Chance to Dance.

“I knew I wanted to do my project related to dance,” Gardner said, “and share my passion for dance with others. I talked with my mom about a variety of different options of dance related projects, and she actually was the one that mentioned doing a dance workshop for people with disabilities, because she knows some people who work with EDD Adaptive Sports” — a nonprofit that was founded in Oneonta and offers sports programs for individuals with disabilities in New York and Vermont.

Gardner partnered with Rosalie Higgins of EDD Adaptive Sports to be her adult adviser and create the dance workshops.

She ran four sessions of the workshop over two days during the summer at Pathfinder Village in Edmeston for some of their residents there and some of their campers.

In addition, she created a flyer with instructions on how to run a dance workshop for people with disabilities, including a link to her Instagram page, and a pamphlet about the benefits of dance and things to keep in mind while running the workshop.

“Hopefully I can inspire other people to start similar programs around town, around the state,” she said.

Higgins, board president of the of EDD Adaptive Sports Foundation, said that Gardner showed “wonderful enthusiasm” for her project.

“She happens to be a very gifted dancer,” Higgins said. “She actually made the dance herself that she taught. It was so well received. You could see the joy on these young people’s faces to be able to participate in that.”

A prerequisite of the Gold Award is earning the Silver Award, the second highest Girl Scout award.

For that project, Gardner and others from her troop — including fellow Gold Award seeker Emily Morell — made life-size outdoor games for Bugbee Children’s Center.

Eastman’s group created story buckets with activities to do outside at Huntington Memorial Library.

Gardner and Eastman also earned the Bronze Award by creating “bug buckets” for Oneonta World of Learning, which are kits for children to gather and study insects, as a troop.

Troop 30296 leader Susan Morell said that both scouts chose projects that fit their passions.

“Anytime I’ve ever taken Leighton [Eastman] on a trip, her most excited reactions have been when we go to zoos and camping, just to see the wildlife in nature,” Morell said, “and I have known Tiffany [Gardner] since even before being in my troop. She started dancing in third grade. It’s great that she’s led that movement of dance and activity.”

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