Winter Garden Girl Scout earns prestigious Gold Award

Amelia Sauls fell in love with the agriculture industry while taking the classes at SunRidge Middle.

Now a senior at West Orange High, the 17-year-old is an FFA member and hopes to have a career in agriculture someday. And as a Girl Scout for 12 years now, her passion was the driving force behind her accomplishment of earning the prestigious Gold Award.

For Girl Scouts, earning the Gold Award means tackling issues that are important to them and driving lasting change in their communities. It’s also an achievement only 2% of Girl Scouts reach.

Earning the Gold Award requires plenty of paperwork, planning, proper execution and presentation skills. But when it came time for Amelia — a member of Troop 707 with the Girl Scouts of Citrus — to start thinking about her project last fall, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

At the end of February — and before the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the United States — Amelia hosted a day camp called “Plant Palooza” for local Girl Scouts in fourth and fifth grade. Her goal was to share information about the agriculture industry while sparking and facilitating the girls’ interest in and knowledge of it.

“I wanted to show girls that ag is not just farming … it’s food sciences, it’s food safety, it’s drug testing. … Our day-to-day life consists of so much ag that no one really knows about, but I wanted to shed light on it.” — Amelia Sauls

“I’ve been taking ag classes since I was in sixth grade, so I knew a bit about it, and I wanted more people to know about it,” Amelia said. “I wanted to educate younger girls … so that they know more about it when they’re looking to getting into classes for ag in middle school. It was a camp that was designed to consist of two different badges through Girls Scouts, so it would be kind of a badge-in-a-day type of thing. They’d get those requirements done while also learning about the ag community. They learned about gardening and all the different steps it takes to start up a garden and different styles of gardening. Then they learned about horticulture, so they learned the different parts of a flower, different types of flowers and how horticulture is used in different jobs, (like a) florist.” 

Amelia began mapping out Plant Palooza last fall and proposed the project to the Girl Scout Council in January. Gold Award projects require girls to have an adviser. For Amelia, it was Katrina Alford, her former agriculture teacher at SunRidge.

Alford is currently studying at the University of Florida to earn her doctoral degree in agricultural education, Amelia said, but she worked hard to help Amelia accomplish her goals.

“(Alford) was definitely the backbone of the project,” Amelia said. “She came down from Gainesville like four or five times during this project to help me with this paperwork and revise my essays. She was the driving factor of it all.”

After her project was approved, it was time to put the plan into action. Amelia and her volunteers hosted Plant Palooza at SunRidge Middle. The girls were shy at first, she said, but the camp was a hit.

“The camp consisted of five different stations — bath-bomb making, plant dissection, floral arrangement, butterfly garden and pizza garden,” she said. “We broke the girls into troops so we could give each and every one of them a different experience. … I wanted it to be a hands-on learning experience that they would actually remember.”

Volunteer high-schoolers acted as camp counselors and led their children around to the different stations, where adult volunteers directed activities and helped keep the girls on task. At the end of the day, the children got to take home a variety of plants and their own floral arrangement.

Amelia added that along with volunteers, it wouldn’t have been possible without in-kind donations from the community and local businesses. Donors included Ace Hardware, Knox Horticulture, Orlando Flower Market and Living Towers.

“I wanted to show girls that ag is not just farming … it’s food sciences, it’s food safety, it’s drug testing,” Amelia said. “Basically, our day-to-day life consists of so much ag that no one really knows about, but I wanted to shed light on it.”

She submitted her paperwork in March and presented her final project to the Girl Scout Council via Zoom in April. Now, Amelia can officially say she is among the 2% of Girl Scouts who end up earning their Gold Award.

“I couldn’t be more proud,” said Nicole Sauls, Amelia’s mom and troop leader. “It’s definitely an accomplishment we always talked about and aimed for. With the whole troop, I emphasized it with the girls about what a prestigious award it is and how many doors it can open for them in their future by showing that they have the dedication to complete that.”