When Allison Huffman decided to pursue the Gold Award at the end of her 12 years in Girl Scouts, she knew she wanted to teach children about mental and physical health.
But she had no idea she would learn just as much as the 80 children she taught.
Huffman, 17, of Penn Township, is one of nearly 210 members of the Girl Scouts Bushy Run service unit, which includes 12 troops across the Penn-Trafford School District.
More than 30 of the girls — ranging from kindergarten to high school — took part in a bridging ceremony at Community United Methodist Church in Penn Township last month, moving up to a higher level in the Girl Scouts organization, said troop leader Angela Brook.
“I think it makes the girls excited to see how much there is for them to achieve,” said Brook, of Trafford. “They get so excited just to cross that bridge.”
It is particularly exciting for Brook to watch the Daisies, the youngest Girl Scouts, move up to become Brownies.
“It’s really exciting for them to see they’ve completed everything they can in Daisies and then they can move on to do more,” she said.
Huffman and two of her fellow 2024 Penn-Trafford graduates — Ivy Thomas and Gabriella Dreistadt — were honored at the ceremony for receiving the Gold Award, the highest achievement available in the Girl Scouts organization.
Attendees pored over poster boards of the Gold Award projects prior to the ceremony. The projects, Brook said, are meant to create a sustainable, positive impact on the community.
Teaching the next generation
For Huffman, this meant launching a program in 2022 called Moving it Out to Figure it Out — teaching children in second through sixth grade about the connection between physical and mental health, including positive coping skills and ways to stay physically active.
Huffman feels even more prepared to enter Pitt’s pharmacy program in the fall with this teaching experience under her belt.
“Before this, I didn’t know how well I’d be able to teach a lot of these topics or explain things to people in the future, as it’s something I’ll have to do in my career, but it’s given me a background and just a baseline of ‘You can do this,’” she said.
“It’s given me a lot of confidence with being able to do hard things. It’s also taught me I absolutely love and adore working with young kids.”
The program teaches children how to identify their feelings and emotions and learn calming skills such as deep breathing, guided imagery, positive affirmations and progressive muscle relaxation.
Each lesson was paired with a fun activity to keep the children engaged. The deep breathing exercise, for example, incorporated blowing bubbles, Huffman said.
“When I was in elementary school, I probably didn’t need as many of the coping skills,” Huffman said. “I definitely needed them by middle school, and the more practice and experience you have using those coping skills — in maybe a slightly less stressful setting — helps whenever you are in a much higher anxiety situation when you’re panicked and frazzled.”
Huffman was surprised by how much information her students retained across the month-long program.
“I’m really proud of all of the kids that I have taught, with how much they’ve learned and they’ve grown. I’m really proud of all of the stuff that they’ve done,” Huffman said. “And I’m more than thrilled knowing they are going into the next phases of their lives with those tools.”
Huffman started the program in 2022 at the Penn Pals Child Care centers on Blank and Paintertown roads in Penn Township. As a member of Penn-Trafford’s wellness committee, she introduced the program to Harrison Park Elementary School in 2023.
“I do want to get those lessons out to the rest of the (elementary) schools,” Huffman said. “I just think it’s something that kids need to learn.”
Gun club space reworked
Ivy Thomas’s Gold Award project has already inspired additional change.
Thomas, 18, of Penn Township, helped revamp a room in the Murrysville Gun Club — decluttering the space and creating a storage shelf.
Thomas has been shooting at the gun club for four years as a member of Penn-Trafford’s rifle team. Her teammates often hang out in the space before practices or home meets.
“I was like ‘We need the room that we all hang out in to be, not livable, but (we need to be) able to all be in here,” Thomas said.
After four months of renovations, the rifle team was able to store their gear and personal items neatly on the wall-length shelf Thomas built.
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As Thomas worked on her project, gun club members contributed to the renovations — creating a drop ceiling, installing new light fixtures, lining the walls with insulation and purchasing new tables for the space.
“I want people to be able to use what we built,” Thomas said of the shelf, which she commemorated with a message to her teammates, followed by her signature. “It makes me feel so good about myself and what we did to the room, seeing people put their stuff in there.”
Thomas supplemented her project by teaching a gun safety class to about 20 people.
Donation distribution made ‘easy and sustainable’
Gabriella Dreistadt shared Thomas’s organizational vision for her Gold Award project.
Dreistadt’s church, Penn Lutheran Church in Penn Borough, collects donations of shoes, clothes, toys, toiletries, glasses and healthcare products to support families in need — locally and abroad.
But over the years, the church’s donation storage room became cluttered and hard to use.
“Their system became really disorganized and the donations were not being sent out in time,” said Dreistadt, 17, of Penn Township. “ In order to complete my Gold Award, I had requested donations from the church for shelves and bins, and I went down and I organized all of the donations that were all over the place.”
With the help of church volunteers, Dreistadt cleared unnecessary items from the space and organized donations in the storage bins and shelves, making the collection and distribution process more efficient.
She created a trifold poster to explain when and where each batch of donations should be sent and presented her new system to church members.
“A lot of church members seemed ready to go down and continuously check the shelves and the bins to see what needs to be sent out and could go over and check the trifold to see where it needed sent to and everything,” she said.
“Church members were excited to see the new state of the organization system and how easy and sustainable it could be.”
Quincey Reese is a TribLive reporter covering the Greensburg and Hempfield areas. She also does reporting for the Penn-Trafford Star. A Penn Township native, she joined the Trib in 2023 after working as a Jim Borden Scholarship intern at the company for two summers. She can be reached at qreese@triblive.com.