Gold Award Spotlight: Girl Scout Chris

Completing a Girl Scout Gold Award leaves a lasting impact—both on the community the project serves and on the Gold Award Girl Scouts who join the ranks of the truly remarkable. Take Gold Award Girl Scout Chris who centered their Gold Award project around creating legal protections for child influencers in 2022.

For Chris's Gold Award project, they created a campaign and website called Quit Clicking Kids that aims to raise awareness about the exploitation and monetization of children on social media through family blogs and vlogs. Quit Clicking Kids asserts this type of content is harmful to children by infringing on their privacy and making the children the primary breadwinners of the family.

Chris said they became interested in this topic after reading about the traumatic experience of a family influencer and learning how this new form of social media content is essentially an unregulated child entertainment industry.

In addition to building education and awareness through their Gold Award project, part of Chris's goal was also to enact legal change. Chris reached out to Washington State Legislature, and now a bill proposing legislation to protect the privacy and ensure the financial compensation of children in Washington State, HB 2032, has been introduced in the House, spearheaded by Representatives Emily Wicks and Liz Berry, and is currently with the House Committee on Civil Rights and Judiciary. Chris's cold calling to local legislators has reached beyond Washington, with other states introducing similar legislation including Maryland, Missouri, Arizona, and California—and just this past summer Illinois signed a similar bill into law!

Chris said the work ethic, organization, planning and project management necessary to complete a Gold Award have been invaluable skills and experience that they’ve been able to apply to their undergraduate coursework at the University of Washington. What's more, Chris enjoys the lifelong connection to Girl Scouts they’ve continued as a Gold Award alum, as one of their closest friends at the university is a also a Gold Award Girl Scout. "It might sound corny, but being a Girl Scout really does teach you lifelong skills and helps you make lifelong friends," Chris said of their experience.

Highest Awards Girl Scouts in Action

In our 2022–2023 membership year, local Girl Scouts completed 14 Gold Award projects, 94 Silver Award projects, and 109 Bronze Award projects—the culmination of more than 8,400 hours of community service hours as part of their projects.

We can't wait to celebrate our next class of Highest Award Girl Scouts at our 2024 Highest Awards Celebration in June!