Gold Award Class of 2025
Gold Award Girl Scouts Use Courage, Confidence and Character To Make a Positive Impact on Their Communities
Baltimore – Since 1916, Girl Scouts across the country have earned Girl Scouts’ highest award—now called the Girl Scout Gold Award—for demonstrating extraordinary leadership and making sustainable change in their communities. On Sunday, May 18, 51 Central Maryland Girl Scouts received the prestigious Gold Award in a ceremony attended by parents, friends, mentors, and local elected officials. Nationally, only six percent of all eligible high school-age Girl Scouts achieve the prestigious Gold Award. Girls who earn this coveted award automatically enter the military one rank higher, qualify for college scholarships and more. In fact, Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) offers $5,000 scholarships to Gold Award Girl Scouts. For the third time since GSUSA has been issuing the monetary award, one of our local Girl Scouts won the scholarship. Lauren Brandt, from Baltimore County, received the $5,000 college scholarship for her Gold Award project: Breaking the Communication Barrier between the Deaf & Hearing Communities. Lauren founded an ASL club at her high school to teach basic sign language and promote Deaf culture. She was inspired by a childhood friend who was deaf in one ear. Lauren said seeing her friend struggle with communication and isolation sparked her passion to raise awareness and break down stigmas associated with the deaf and hard-of hearing community.
Earning the Gold Award requires planning and implementation of a challenging, large-scale project that is innovative, engages others, and has a lasting impact on its targeted community. In each case, girls expanded their leadership and teamwork skills as they collaborated with community members and businesses to complete and implement sustainable projects.
Other topics and issues addressed by girls’ Gold Award projects this year included food insecurity by supporting and supplementing the work of local food pantries; improving child literacy by creating book boxes and little libraries; providing information and resources for pet adoption and care; and encouraging environmental studies by creating a school garden. One Girl Scout put recycling on display by creating four bottle cap murals from the 8,000 she collected; another Girl Scout informed her community about the benefits of composting and created a video demonstrating how to make a DIY Bokashi bucket while another tackled inclusivity by building a music room for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We congratulate our 2025 Gold Award Girl Scouts for the positive impact their projects have on their communities.
Media Note: For interviews with these Girl Scouts about their Gold Award journey and final projects, please contact dterry@gscm.org.
Girl Scouts of Central Maryland provides leadership programming for girls in grades K-12 who reside in Baltimore City, Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford and Howard counties. Through our programming we strive to develop girls of courage, confidence and character who make the world better by having a positive impact in their communities.
To learn more about Girl Scouts of Central Maryland, visit gscm.org.
June 30, 2025
