Photo: Girl Scouts of America
ACTON, Mass (WBZNewsRadio) - A young woman from Acton is being recognized with a $10,000 scholarship by the Girl Scouts of the USA, after she created a pilot program to educate high schoolers about endometriosis.
Claudia Castro was diagnosed with the illness when she was a junior in High School, having suffering from a lifetime of severe menstrual pain.
"Since my diagnosis, I have met and learned about many women who live in pain for years because they didn't know how to advocate for themselves." Castro said.
Castro noticed her school's health curriculum lacked in educational programs that focused on things like endometriosis and other problems impacting the reproductive health of young women. That's when she decided to create her own lecture-based lesson plan and began educating the freshman class. What's more her program is sustainable and is expected to be taught within the school system for the next several years.
Castro is just one of 110 Gold Award Girl Scouts receiving the $10,000 scholarship this year. Across the country, nearly 3,200 Girl Scouts are recipients of the 2023 Gold Award. This year's class of recipients raised some $2.5 million in funding and invested more than 300,000 hours to take on real-life problems impacting their communities, such as environmental sustainability, racial justice, mental health and gender inequality in STEM.
"Gold Award Girl Scouts are rock stars, role models, and real life heroes." The Girl Scouts of America said on their website. "How do they do it? By using everything they've learned as a Girl Scout to help fix a problem in their community or make a lasting change in their world."
According to recent research from the Girl Scouts of America, those who receive the Gold Award are more likely to fill leadership roles in their future careers. In fact 87-percent of Gold Star Scouts said their experience earning the award gave them the skills to help them succeed in other facets of their lives.
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