Cypress Girl Scouts earn Gold Award

Girl Scouts Megan Osburn and Erica Strautman earned the Girl Scouts of San Jacinto Council Gold Award by volunteering at Carruth Center, a children's occupational therapy center.

The Gold Award is the highest possible honor that a Girl Scout can achieve and requires outstanding leadership skills and more than 100 community service hours. These hours of dedication must include a service project to help the community.

Osburn said in the press release, "I chose this project because I love working with kids, and the Carruth Center needed my attention." Strautman said, "I found that the center had a need for improvement and wanted to enhance the children's therapy environment."

The improvements that the Girl Scouts made to the center included painting a chalkboard wall, reorganizing filing cabinets, adding mulch to flower beds, sewing mats and building structures to aid in therapy such as a balance beam and wooden testing boxes.

But the girls did not complete these tasks alone. They hosted a series of workshops to finish the projects and illustrated the leadership skills required to earn the Gold Award.

Osburn and Strautman have been members of Girl Scouts for 10 and 11 years, respectively, and plan to apply the skills they acquired working on this service project to fulfill future college ambitions.