Makinen Earns the Girl Scout Gold
By Chuck Bingaman, Contributing Writer
Walpole’s Karri Makinen, an academic leader in her senior class at Fall Mountain Regional High School, has earned the Gold Award, the highest honor in Girl Scouting.
Makinen, daughter of Ron Makinen and Tammy Vittum of Sand Hill Road,Walpole, enrolled in Daisy Scouts 13 years ago when the family lived in
Charlestown, and she's been an active Girl Scout ever since. Now 18, Makinen is in Senior Troop #3005 that is led by her mother and Judy Trow of Walpole.
Earning “the Gold” meant a great deal of preliminary work, earlier projects and recognitions such as the Silver Award, and a major community project within the strict qualifying rules of the Girl Scouts USA.
Makinen managed to meet all the Gold Award requirements, despite having to adjust to major changes in the Gold Award requirements made by the Girl Scouts while she was completing them. “I don’t give up on things easily,” she laughed in a recent interview. “My mom was always there to encourage me. And my project advisor, Virginia Carter, sent me encouraging emails and helped in many other ways!”
As explained on the Girl Scout web page, the Gold Award “is something that the girl can be passionate about—in thought, deed and action. The project is something that fulfills a need with a girl’s community (whether local or global), creates change, and is something that is ongoing."
Makinen's Gold Award community project required the planning, staffing and offering of six community education events in March 2007. Classes included basic knitting, readying children for kindergarten, quilting, CPR and “Cards for Troops”, a class for all ages designing, making and sending cards for soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. And the project didn’t end when the sessions ended. Small pieces of quilted were given to an Alstead woman whose quilting materials and finished quilts were lost in the 2005 flood. The cards were sent to troops in foreign assignments, and the knitted samples were sent to a hospice for making into afghans.
“All the community education sessions worked out really well,” Makinen noted. “I especially liked seeing several grandmothers working closely with lots of little Brownies making cards together!” She added that, while the community education sessions have not yet been repeated, she is keeping the planning materials and hoping that another person will step forward to carry on the project.
Karri's Project Advisor, Virginia Carter, said that she had envisioned being required to spend a vast amount of time helping on the project. But, said, “I was just amazed by her! She’s such a self-starter. She did it all. I just added a little encouragement along the way!
In addition to being an academic leader of her class and a Gold Award winner, Karri Makinen has, for four years, been a Big Sister to a girl who is now in middle school. Now she now is a Big Sister to a second grade boy with whom she meets every Friday afternoon after school. Last month Makinen joined 50 Keene and Monadnock High School students in a Rotary Interact Club house-building project in El Salvador where they built seven basic homes in a week. She said the project “was amazing! I loved it! It was in a really small village. The people were really nice, and they really appreciated the work we did!”
Makinen is deciding whether to attend St. Michaels College in Vermont or Colby College in Maine in the fall. Before then, though, she says, “I just love playing the flute, so I’ll be playing again this summer in the Westmoreland Town Band before going off to school!”
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