Photo courtesy Girl Scouts of Gulfcoast Florida

Senior Girl Scout Katie Burkett of Fort Myers earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor awarded to a Senior Girl Scout in Girl Scouting.

Photo courtesy Girl Scouts of Gulfcoast Florida

Senior Girl Scout Trish Woolfe of Fort Myers earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor awarded to a Senior Girl Scout in Girl Scouting.

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FORT MYERS — Senior Girl Scouts Katie Burkett and Trish Woolfe of Fort Myers earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor awarded to a Senior Girl Scout in Girl Scouting. This award involves a two-year process in which a Senior Girl Scout plans and implements a large-scale community service project reflecting her individual interests and skills. Projects must challenge girl’s abilities and be innovative and creative in nature. Prerequisites include projects in areas of skill development, leadership, service, and career explorations.

For her Girl Scout Gold Award service project, Katie chose to help a family whom she had met through her Girl Scout Bronze Award project at Gabriel House, a not-for-profit foster home for disabled children. The family needed infant clothing and items for two new infants they were getting from India. Katie hosted baby showers at eight different Girl Scout troops and collected more than 400 items. Katie had planned to purchase additional baby clothes for the children, but because of the overwhelming response to her project, she decided to use more than $350 of her Girl Scout cookie money to buy IPods for the other five foster children, who are teens. Katie realized that often older children are forgotten, so she decided that this would be a great way to recognize them.

Katie has been a Girl Scout for ten years and has earned her both the Girl Scout Bronze and Silver awards. She is a sophomore at Cypress Lake High School and a member of the varsity basketball team for two years. She also received the Do the Right Thing award in Lee County for caring for her dad during the summer, while her mother worked. Her dad was recovering from five by-pass heart surgery and needed daily care. The Do the Right Thing program recognizes students for good behavior and positive actions, in and out of school.

As a means of giving others a vision of hope for a better future, Trish arranged to provide free eye exams and eyeglasses to local students who could not otherwise afford it. She enlisted the help of school nurses and the Lion's Club to refer students, whose vision was worse than 20/50 and who were in financial need. With the help of optometrists, opticians, and support staff, Trish was able to provide exams and eyeglasses for 15 students.

Trish also recruited local Girl Scout troops to collected new books for the students to read after they received their new eyeglasses. More than 150 books were collected and given to the students. Trish believes that the most rewarding part of her project was when she discovered that several students, who were unknowingly legally blind, were given 20/20 vision with their new eyeglasses.

Trish’s project provided glasses for children who normally would have been referred to the Lion's Club. However, with the money the Lion's Club saved because of Trish’s project, the club was able to provide cataract surgery for two adults, therefore, giving even more people the gift of sight.