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Valrico Girl Scouts Go For Gold

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By D'ANN LAWRENCE WHITE

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 16, 2008

TAMPA - Three young women from Valrico have brought home the Gold, and they never stepped foot in China for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics to do it.

Instead, they performed outstanding feats of community service that earned them an honor only 5,500 girls in the United States receive each year.

On June 14, Stephanie Dye, Sarah Sullivan and Margaret Schmidt received the highest honor in Girl Scouts, the Gold Award.

The awards were presented at the annual Girl Scouts of West Central Florida Gold Award Reception at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Sabal Park, Tampa. The trio was among 32 Scouts from West Central Florida to receive the honor this year, according to Linda Babb, president of Girl Scouts of West Central Florida.

"To earn the Gold Award, a Girl Scout must take all of the knowledge, leadership and networking skills she has developed over the years and set forth to complete a service project that will benefit her community," Babb said. "She must discover what it is that her community needs; connect with local businesses, organizations and neighbors; and take actions to better the world around her."

The Girl Scout Gold Award project is similar to the Eagle Scout project in Boy Scouts. Girls spend 65 hours planning and implementing their projects, which must have a lasting and positive impact on the community.

For Schmidt, making an impact meant going outside her community to the tiny village of La Victoria in the Dominican Republic.

Schmidt, a Durant High School student and a Girl Scout for 11 years, is a member of the Life Teen Ministry at Nativity Catholic Church. For more than 20 years, Nativity has sponsored mission projects in La Victoria, a village about 30 miles east of the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo.

Members of the church youth group planned to travel to the impoverished village to help refurbish the homes of needy families in June 2007. Before the trip, Schmidt learned that the mission needed children's Spanish books for its reading center.

She began soliciting money, books and materials for the project at home and collected 146 books to take to La Victoria. Once there, Schmidt, with the help of fellow teens, made brightly painted book shelves and outfitted the reading center with rugs, pillows and a comfortable chair.

For her Gold Award project, Sullivan, a Durant High School graduate who attends Boston University, came up with the Winthrop Goes Green recycling initiative for the Winthrop Town Centre being developed by her parents, John and Kay Sullivan. The 149-acre neotraditional community at Bloomingdale Avenue and Providence Road includes a mix of commercial and residential buildings in a pedestrian-friendly environment.

To discourage the use of cars, Sullivan, a Girl Scout for 14 years, developed a program that places refurbished bicycles and bike racks made from old bike parts throughout the community that residents and visitors can use to get from one destination to another.

She also started a community recycling initiative for carpeting, cardboard, paper, plastics, aluminum and metal left over from construction and encouraged installation of automatic light switches in new buildings.

Dye, also a Durant High graduate, opted for a Gold Award project that would promote organ transplants after she and her father, Tom Dye, underwent successful heart transplants at Tampa General Hospital.

Dye, a Girl Scout for 13 years, sent quilting squares and instructions to fellow heart transplant recipients from Tampa General, asking them to sew a design on the square depicting how they felt about receiving their gift of life.

She then stitched the 25 squares sent back into a quilt and presented it to Mark Weston, medical director of the heart transplant program at Tampa General, to be displayed in the unit "as a visual thank-you to him and his staff," she said.

"There's really no way you can say thank you for a gift like this," said Dye, a University of South Florida student majoring in public relations in the hopes of spreading the word about organ and tissue donation. "You just take care of it and appreciate every day."

Dye also is a spokeswoman for LifeLink Foundation, a nonprofit Florida service organization dedicated to increasing organ and tissue donations. She and her father will be featured in The Faces of Transplantation 2009 LifeLink calendar. In addition, Dye is involved with USF's Get Carded program, which encourages students to sign up to be organ donors and keep cards stating their intentions in their wallets.

For information on joining the Girl Scouts, visit www.gswcf.org.

Reporter D'Ann Lawrence White can be reached at (813) 657-4524 or dlwhite@tampatrib.com.

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