Graduating Girl Scouts

Honoring MPSH Senior Girl Scout Gold Awardees

Known as the “highest award in Girl Scouting,” the Girl Scout Gold Award serves as the pinnacle recognition of service and commitment to a Girl Scout’s community; requiring a minimum of 80 community service hours, a thorough application process and more, for 100 years, girls from across Miami-Dade and Monroe County have strived to make the perfect ending to their Girl Scout experience. As the year comes to a close, Miami Palmetto Senior High honors its graduating 2022-2023 Gold Award Girl Scouts.

Jacqueline Banegas - Namaste NICU

“[ICU Baby]… supports families with newborns …in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit I partnered with them… [to create] Sibling Month… a lot of these families have other children that don’t really understand what’s going on… so we do a story time as part of Sibling Month, which ICU Baby is going to continue doing every year, and we have a story hour. I was a baby 18 years ago in the NICU myself. So I kind of came full circle, and I am the one to help families like that because that was my mom and my sister when I was in the hospital,” Banegas said.

Alexis Blackwell - Bee Part Of The Solution

“My project targeted the declining bee population… I saw that the issue of climate change…was getting a lot of attention, but smaller things that really feed into [climate change], like the declining bee population were going ignored… I educated the public through brochures… I passed out at a farmers market. I also placed six mason bee houses at Zoo Miami… and started a petition to ban neonics… a pesticide that [is] very detrimental to the bee population and affects the whole hive…I tried to target something that was less talked about,” Blackwell said.

Gabriela

Brayer - MPSH Mental Health Resource Guide

“The main topic [of my project] is… tackling depression and anxiety amongst teens, mainly at our school… My best friend has gone through a ton of anxiety… and she actually ended up in the hospital earlier last year, so that hit really hard and inspired this project... I found out there was a whole team of people at our school… that can totally help and I had no idea about it and I know a lot of people also didn’t know about it; so, I made a resource guide… it’s posted on our [social media] account and it was also… handed out… I just really wanted to help anybody who needed it,” Brayer said.

Abigail Lambert - Project DIGIT

“My project is called Project DIGIT, which stands for Digital and Internet Growth In Time. It targeted the lack of digital literacy in ninth grade class-