Gold Award | Girl Scouts of Montana and Wyoming
Mairin Sims (Laramie, WY)

Mairin worked with the Laramie Downtown Clinic; the clinic focuses on providing the uninsured experiencing poverty with integrated healthcare services. Working with clinic staff, volunteers and the board, she created an organizational system to record services provided and improve their reporting system to the Board of Directors. Her efforts will enable the clinic to receive more funding from donors and grants, increase awareness of the clinic services in the community and enhance volunteer and patient engagement with the clinic. Her work was shared with the Albany County United Way’s Community Impact Cooperative so other medical clinics can benefit from her work.

Grace Regan (Jackson, WY)

Grace recognized the lack of resources for teens struggling with anxiety and using her love of art, she collaborated with Dr. Kelly Gutierrez, Ph.D., to develop and author a coloring book with tools and techniques to deal with anxiety. Grace shared her book in print and digital formats to local professionals and organizations as well as a large group of doctors and psychologists and a school director in Round Rock, TX. Grace’s coloring book pages were showcased at the 2023 Girl Scout National Convention in the Calm Corner where convention participants could go to decompress and relax. If you or someone you know could benefit from Grace’s mental health coloring book, you can find a copy here.

RJ Schoen (Casper, WY) 

RJ addressed the issue of period poverty and stigma at their school and in their community. To do this, RJ partnered with the national organization PERIOD to establish a PERIOD chapter in their high school. The PERIOD chapter created a safe space for students to collaborate and advocate for change for themselves and others as well as continue the work RJ has started. They hosted workshops with educators on how to address period poverty in the classroom which has opened up many conversations about period poverty. RJ also led their PERIOD chapter team by organizing period product drives, workshops and social media content.

Kieran Burns (Laramie, Wyoming) 

Kieran collaborated with the University of Wyoming’s Wyoming Natural Diversity Database to discover more about the declining native bee populations. She collected bee samples for identification and data analysis as well as assisted in species identification. She also tested a new bee trap that had not been previously used in the area. Incredibly, one of the samples Kieran collected included a species of bee that had not been observed in that area before; this finding will continue to be a topic of study for the University of Wyoming. Kieran also launched a community educational campaign to teach people the importance of pollinators and how to protect them, specifically Mason bees and other solitary pollinators. She also led a hands-on workshop where participants learned about bees and built bee hotel for their backyard to serve as ideal habitats for pollinators.

GSMW Gold Award Stories