Girl Scouts of Southeastern Michigan honors Mikayla Porter with the most prestigious award in the world for girls: the Girl Scout Gold Award. Mikayla, of Milford, 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, Mikayla took action by teaching high school students home economics skills that they’ll use for the rest of their lives. During the start of the pandemic, she noticed that while American fast food restaurants were still open for business, other countries’ fast food locations were not. This led her to teach peers about the importance of home economics. These home economics skills included doing dishes, laundry, cooking, sewing, etc. Mikayla started planning to do in-person “classes” at her high school, unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic did not allow for that. Though this was a stepping-stone in her plans, she adjusted and decided to make videos of some home economic skills to post online. To find out which skills to highlight in her videos, she surveyed her classmates on which skills they felt that they had not been taught before going to college. Mikayla enlisted the help of her fellow Girl Scout sisters to make the videos.

“This project has taught me the necessary leadership skills that’ll be essential as I enter young adulthood.”