Madison's Gold Award

Dear Cole’s Closet,

Thank you so much for allowing me to drop of hundreds of dollars' worth of toys that is near and dear to my heart on November 2, 2020.

My name is Madison Speilman and even though I’m just 14 years old, I have faced some serious health issues in the last year which have resulted in my hospitalization. Because of those health issues, I will always focus on healthy living. My experience made me keenly aware of deficiencies in our society that target our young people to help those live healthier lives. My Girl Scout Gold Award Proposal will focus on Health and Fitness Awareness impacting the world around us.

In April 2019, I was released from INOVA Children’s hospital to treat my condition by healthy eating and exercise. I was weak, couldn't walk, and physical therapy was much needed to relieve pain, and restore muscle and joint function. Keeping myself healthy by eating the proper things and exercising made me stronger, and able to fight off other diseases that I couldn’t do before.

"I want to help make the world a better and healthier place to live in as we were taught by the Girl Scout law and promise."

I learned that general healthy-living is a good way to start giving your immune system the upper hand. Every part of your body, including your immune system functions better when protected from environmental assaults and healthy living strategies.

I have been in and out of doctors’ offices seeing tons of different people who are sick. I want to be able to help lower those numbers by holding Health Fairs, Workshops and Yoga classes. With what our country is going thru having some of these events online would give people around the world ways to be healthy and active. Physical inactivity is the 4th leading risk factor for worldwide mortality. The number of children who reported physical activity of at least 20 minutes per day, three days per week increased their lifespan. The national average for regular exercise is 51.6%. Children now spend more than 7 ½ hours a day in front of a screen. Children and families need to pay attention to that by changing their physical activity and eating habits which promote good health and well-being. By doing this, it will help to maintain a healthy weight, reduce risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol, developing cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. Conducting my Healthy Workshops on October 10th, 2020 I focused on nutritional topics such as eating on a budget, how to lose weight and how to keep it off and creating healthy meal and snack choices.

Yoga classes will start involving children and not just adults. Hopefully, workout gyms will like such an idea and implement it into their class schedule making it worldwide. We can use our accounts to film this class LIVE and then share it via YouTube so that everyone can use them at their own convenience. They will learn the importance of keeping their body in shape while burning calories and strengthening the body, Yoga practices have been found to enhance positive moods, focus the mind, and increase energy levels.

So far my videos have reached over 15 states amongst the Girl Scouts community and still spreading during these difficult times.

There many statistics in the world about any issue you can imagine like COVID-19 rapidly becoming a leading cause of death worldwide. My team chose to concentrate on preventing such deaths. Besides COVID-19; obesity, high blood pressure and high glucose, tobacco use, and cancers are also leading root causes.

For starters, cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in children. Cancer is a complex group of diseases with many possible causes. Although, the initial root cause of cancer is microbes and parasites that are in one's organs or colon which weakens the immune system.

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death. Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year. Cigarette smoking causes about 1 of every 5 deaths in the United States each year.

More than 80 million people have high blood pressure ages 20 and older. The death rate from high blood pressure has increased by 11% in the past 10 years and that percentage increases daily. Compared to people who have normal blood pressure those who have high blood pressure are at risk for a stroke. High blood pressure is caused by smoking, lack of physical activity, stress, alcohol, being overweight, and too much salt in the diet.

Globally, obesity is one of the top five leading causes of death. It causes more than 2.8 million deaths each year. Obesity rates have increased for all populations in the United States over the last several decades. In the year 2016, 39.8% of people 20 and over were obese. The cause of obesity is usually eating too much and moving too little causing long term damage to your body. People who experience severe obesity are more likely and are more prone to experience more diseases. Those diseases can include Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea.

By knowing these statistics and what it can do to a person's health and fatality rate, we can help address these problems and find better ways to help prevent such issues and help keep our community safe and healthy.

Developing my confidence would allow me to lead a group of classmates, parents, troop members, and our community. To guide those people in teaching others to develop healthy eating pattern while improving their mind, body, and spirit.

People will depend on me and I need to demonstrate dedication and commitment in all areas, from creating volunteering assignments , making sure the Health Fair runs smoothly, to the importance of team work making my Take Action Project successful.

Most teams who want to implement a better lifestyle are composed of Doctors, Nurses, Social workers, and other people in the healthcare industry. In order to promote healthcare in our community, our team will consist of a classmates, parents, Girl Scouts, Fitness Instructors, Event planner as well as our community to make this happen by means of conducting my Health Eating Workshops and Yoga videos.

All projects have to end, but our project and its impact should continue. In order to make our mission worldwide, the community will be informed of how the project went by creating a Facebook page, Twitter, and other websites that will be linked to a larger website with similar research.

We will also take our project outside of our local community and inspire others to take action. Such places as Gyms, Schools, Churches, Community Centers, Youth Groups, Rallyhood, and Doctors’ offices.

Upon making those videos and accounts, we will be able to invite our friends, community leaders, and people from organizations who are struggling with the same or related problem to take a look at it. They can then forward them to people they know which will be like a butterfly effect on how it will spread throughout the world. Please inquire within if you’re interested in seeing my Yoga book and other important to help you live longer and happier in life.

I bet if you asked several people on why a project is hard they would come up with many different answers. But for me, coming up with a timeline for the activities and finding the funding to make it happen will be incredible challenging.

By collecting feedback during and after our Workshop, Health Fair, and Yoga classes would allow me to see the success of our hard work. While my target audience will gain the ability to take care of themselves and others to increase their chances to have a healthy life and living style.

I hope that you enjoy my Girl Scout Take Action project for it means a lot to me having been in the INOVA Children’s hospital learning all that I did. Although this may sound like a lot to do, it is a very important cause to me to give back to my community with the help on my team.

I want to help make the world a better and healthier place to live in as we were taught by the Girl Scout law and promise.

Madison

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