On May 10, senior and Girl Scout Nadia Kushner was awarded the Gold Award, the most prestigious honor that a Girl Scout can receive. She received the award from her troop and the Horsham Township Council on Saturday, May 20.

Nadia is no stranger to winning Girl Scout awards. 

As a Girl Scout, Nadia and her fellow troopmates are continuously challenged to do service projects in their local community, which ultimately allow them to earn awards, both as a troop and individually.

In elementary school, Nadia’s girl scout troop earned the Bronze Award by volunteering at an animal shelter, and in middle school, she earned the Silver Award by holding dance classes through the studio that she competes for.

Now, however, Nadia has taken her service to the next level. Recently, she completed the eighty community service hours needed to earn the Gold Award.

To earn this, each scout must do a “Take Action” project that, in some way, impacts their community. Each project takes about a year in length, and only 5% of Girl Scouts successfully earn this honor. 

Nadia created a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) curriculum for College Settlement Camp, a local day and night camp that serves underprivileged children in the Philadelphia area. She made one lesson for each topic covered in STEAM and taught them over a one-week period at the camp. She found the majority of the lessons online, but she was able to alter them so that they were more compatible with the structure of College Settlement’s day camp.

Now that Nadia taught the lessons once, she left her curriculum and the corresponding lesson plans at the camp so that future students can participate in her STEAM activities, impacting the next generation of learners at College Settlement.

Even though she was doing it for the kids, she gained more than just an award: “watching them do [the experiments] and learn gave me a new perspective,” she said.