She graduated this past Spring from Natick High School. She was just awarded her Girl Scout Gold Award.  Mary is currently attending Marist College in New York. 

Mary has been a part of Girl Scout Troop 72293 since second grade. In addition to being part of her troop, Mary has served in many leadership roles with Natick Girls Scouts. Including mentoring younger Girl Scouts and leading town-wide Girl Scout events.

The Girl Scout Gold Award is the organization’s highest recognition for individual community service leadership, requiring high school students to dedicate 80 hours to a project that identifies a problem and provides a sustainable solution for lasting change. Approximately 6% of Girl Scout Scouts nationwide earn this prestigious award.

Mary’s Gold Award project developed and taught a food allergy curriculum to elementary age students at the Tobin School in Natick Massachusetts. 

“The Gold Award is an 80 hour take action project in which a Girl Scout chooses an issue in their community or a topic in the world that they care about and want to make a positive change on. Given that I have a nut allergy, for my Gold Award project I decided to educate elementary aged students at The Tobin Children’s School about food allergies as these students are not always informed on the topic in mainstream school systems.

“Given the timing and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time that I began my project, I was forced to shift the entire endeavor to be online in hopes to be able to work with the students. Given these circumstances I created four 30-minute video lessons that covered different aspects of food allergies. These aspects included the top eight allergens, what food allergies are, the symptoms that come along with food allergies, how to help someone having an allergic reaction, the causes of food allergies in people, how people find out what they are allergic to, the challenges that those with a food allergies face and lastly ways in which one can help these people. 

“With these topics in mind I hand crafted corresponding activities including a bingo game, memory game, scenario evaluations, and informative coloring sheets. In the end, while I wasn’t able to connect with these students face to face I was able to collect data with a pre and post lesson survey and each of the students who participated demonstrated that they understood the material presented through questions on each topic stated above,” she said.