SWAMPSCOTT — Select Board members awarded local Girl Scouts certificates of recognition Wednesday in honor of their work promoting environmentalism and mental health.
Troop 72182 members earned a bronze award for their project helping to decrease feelings of isolation for Swampscott’s seniors. Troop 69015 members received a silver award for their work cleaning up trash at Muskrat Pond. Troop 63146 member and recent Swampscott High School graduate Maura Cronin received the Girl Scout Gold Award.
To earn the Gold Award, the highest achievement in Girl Scouts, one must identify an issue in their community, draft plans to address its root cause, and lead a team of volunteers to implement it.
Cronin’s project focused on improving young girls’ mental health and raising awareness of the dangers of social media.
“I decided to make this project because I noticed that especially during the pandemic, so many girls around me were struggling with their mental health,” Cronin said.
In response, she led a campaign to add self-help and self-confidence books to Swampscott Public Library’s inventory. She first started working on the project during her freshman year at Swampscott High School.
Last year, she gave a talk at the library to raise awareness of tools young girls can use to combat negative social media impacts. She said she also created a website listing local mental health resources for people living in Swampscott.
“We’ve talked a lot in our recent meeting about the overall need for this, not just for young people, but for everybody in our community,” said Neal Duffy, Select Board Chair. “You recognized that at that age and did something about it and did all this work to make your peers feel better about themselves and their place in this world. It’s an incredible thing.”
Select Board member and former Eagle Scout Peter Spellios said her project is important because it will require young adults like Cronin who understand social media’s negative impacts first-hand to inform younger generations of its dangers.
“This is where the parents are not showing you the right way,” Spellios told troop members. “Social media is not real. The relationships you make when you go to Girl Scouts, those are real.”
Swampscott Girl Scouts Irina Andrinopoulos, Lucy Gentry, Alexandra Hurley, Jesselle Landen, Tea O’Donoghue, Reagan Pelletier, and Jolina Phea make up Troop 72182. In an effort to minimize isolation for Swampscott’s older residents, they hosted a game day at the Senior Center.
Troop 69015 members Lucy Kline, Evelyn Miller, and Scout Myers-Smith set out to address pollution at Muskrat Pond. As part of their project, they cleaned up the pond, surrounding area, and nearby trails. They led three clean-ups, filling over seven large trash bags and disposing of three tires.
