Girl Scouts of Southeastern Michigan honors Ingrid Huang with the most prestigious award in the world for girls: the Girl Scout Gold Award. Ingrid, of Troy, is among 14 young women who have taken the initiative to bettering their communities through sustainable community change projects. The time and commitment they’ve dedicated towards these projects prove they’re true leaders and exceptional examples for all girls to look up to.

The Gold Award is Girl Scout’s highest honor and is presented to Girl Scouts who address a community issue or problem they are passionate about. They’re required to spend at least 80 hours investigating the problem, creating a plan and implementing it.

For her Gold Award project, Ingrid worked to enhance a community library to promote reading and learning about Chinese culture. She also wanted to get a better understanding of her culture herself and give= back to her community. So, she decided to create an online catalog for people to browse the books from anywhere, anytime. She also created a holding form so readers could save time and effort in requesting their desired books for checkout without physically coming to the library. Lastly, she introduced a color-coding system to go along with each of the categories the books belong in, saving librarians time in maintenance and readers time in navigating the library. The result has been a transformed community library where readers love to read and are able to browse and hold books from the comfort of wherever they may be, along with a more aesthetically pleasing and easy to maintain library.

“This project has helped me learn leadership, communication, problem solving skills, as well as develop a newfound interest in and
appreciation for Chinese culture.”