I just wanted to add this page as a way to help other Girl Scouts who are aspiring to go for their Gold Award. It's a goal that you really have to start thinking about a few years before your senior year. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do and still meet all of the requirements on time. I'm offering my experience that I hope will help you with your Gold Award.
The best advise I can give is to select a topic that has meaning to you. It's really hard to figure that out when you are younger but just brainstorm as much as you can. Try to come up with a bunch of ideas and write them down. Things will change as it goes along.
How I came up with my topic:
I have food allergies and intolerances that have not been fun. When I was little, I was lactose intolerant, but I grew out of it. There are still foods I have to avoid or I can end up with a stomach ache, or congestion, and in severe cases, a rash. So, cooking fresh foods, without hidden ingredients, is something we do in my family. I'm really into taking supplements and eating a lot of organic vegetables and fresh fruit. But, I'm not perfect about it. I still eat stuff I'm not supposed to.
In 10th grade I did a research paper on organic food. I learned a lot about the topic, which was very disturbing. But, that paper, along with my food issues, gave me the idea to do the Golden Garden as my project. The theme of my project is a global issue too, so it met that very difficult requirement.
The next step was figuring out what to do. I knew I had to do an organic garden. But, how would I bring it all together and be able to communicate the message? I wanted to use my photography too, so the idea of a video was the answer. The Gold Award paperwork for the proposal really helps in this part. When I did my presentation, the Girl Scout council helped me with a lot of suggestions too.
The best thing you can do is come up with an idea that doesn't involve fundraising. You are much better off figuring out the costs and then asking your family or friends for help. It gets too complicated with fundraising. I was fortunate because my project wasn't too expensive.
When I did the garden part of my project, it was extremely difficult for a lot of reasons I can't get into here. But, I learned a lot. The focus of my project was the message... what we buy to eat as individual people eventually has an impact on everyone. The video had to be the centerpiece of my project.
I live in a rural area where there is a lot of farmland and I am personally watching the landscape change. Open fields that were so beautiful are being turned into more shopping centers. It was pretty obvious to me that farmland preservation tied into my project.
My family originally never bought too many organic groceries because they are expensive. So, we just switch out certain foods and started with the basics. Now, we are very aggressive about saving money on organic and non-GMO foods. We cook a lot of meals and make snacks instead of buying pre-packaged foods. Now that I'm older and can drive, I do a lot of the grocery shopping for my family and I know what to look for when I go to the store. I take a fresh organic salad to school every day and I make my own dressing with organic: olive oil, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice and seasonings. Money saving tips was originally going to be on my website but I realized that it had to be an important part of my video.
The foundation of my video was the script. It took a lot of drafts but this process really helped me to get my message clear. Once my script was done, I went through over a thousand photos that I took at the garden. I wanted an arial view of farmland at the beginning but it was too expensive to buy a drone. I ended up using Pixabay.com, where they offer free photos and video clips. They had really nice arial scenes and also for some stock photos that I needed.
For a global reach, use social media and a website to promote your project. Make a list of organizations and businesses that have a similar message to your project. Once your project is done, send an email asking them to help promote your project.
Website:
You can buy an inexpensive domain name a lot of places on the internet. My mom bought my name at GoDaddy.com when I was a baby. Once you get your domain name, there are a bunch of different places to choose from to host your website. I used Weebly.com for my website because the templates are really nice and it's pretty easy to use. They offer a lot of other things to help make your site look really nice. (You can buy your domain from them too) In Weebly, you choose a template and then just build from there. They make suggestions along the way and offer a lot of free photos. But, I used my own photos. Most of the building in Weebly is drag and drop. You can get tutorials on YouTube.
Video: I used iMovie on my iPad for the video production and it's really easy, but it still took a lot of time. There's not a lot of editing you can do in iMovie, especially with the audio, but it worked really well for me. They have music you can use for free too.
For the animated part of my video, I used VideoScribe. We used this program at my school and it's also very easy. But, you need the subscription version to really get the best results. The free version is a little glitchy. They offer a lot of free images that animate once they are placed. If you want to use VideoScribe, look up the topic of vector vs. raster images on YouTube to learn about file types. I used two logos that were already vectorized.