By Joanne Degnan
ALLENTOWN — The Borough Council on June 14 honored three girls from the Allentown-Robbinsville Area Girl Scouts Troop 71858 for completing service projects that made a difference in people’s lives.
Kelsey Carroll, 18, of Allentown, recently earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest achievement in all of scouting, for her long-term service project working with homeless women and children.
Kelsey’s sister, Madeline Carroll, 11, a 5th-grader at Stone Bridge Middle School, and Hannah Ferguson-Perl, a 5th-grader at McFarland Intermediate School in Bordentown, both earned the Girl Scout Bronze Award, the highest honor that a Junior Girl Scout can achieve.
Mayor Stuart Fierstein read the official borough proclamations to the girls, who were then congratulated by all of the council members and given a warm round of applause by the audience.
”I expected a much older person because of all of your accomplishments and badges,” Mayor Fierstein joked as Kelsey accepted her proclamation.
Madeline and Hannah’s project was to make soft fleece pillows in the shape of hearts to comfort hospitalized kids. Both girls drew upon personal experience to come up with the idea for their project. Hannah had received a similar pillow while she was a patient at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Madeline’s mom, who brought the girls to the council meeting, had been a patient four years ago at the Cancer Institute of NJ, the New Brunswick hospital that the girls chose to donate their heart pillows to for pediatric cancer patients.
Kelsey, who graduated from Peddie School last month and will be attending Rider University’s Westminster College of the Arts in the fall, completed a project called “Heart to Art: Breaking the Stereotypes of Poverty One Canvas at a Time.”
Working with HomeFront’s art therapy program, ArtSpace, Kelsey organized and hosted an exhibition at Peddie School’s Mariboe Gallery that featured the art of the homeless women and children served by HomeFront. Kelsey also managed a renovation of the ArtSpace room, ran an art supply drive, and gave art lessons to HomeFront children.
When asked what she learned from her project, Kelsey said her “Aha!” moment came during the art lessons for the children.
”I got to see the children truly enjoying what they were doing,” Kelsey said. “They were smiling and having fun. That’s it. That’s why we do what we do. Through our Gold Award projects we have the ability to improve the lives of others and I am incredibly honored to have had the chance to do that,” Kelsey said.
Kelsey was one of four high school girls who achieved a Gold Award at the Allentown-Robbinsville Girl Scouts 2nd Annual Bridging Ceremony on May 13 in Robbinsville. The others were Shannon Buckley, Masooma Muzaffar, and Christine Chun.
