‘Distance Doesn’t Matter’
St. Joseph grad earns Girl Scout Gold Award with sea-turtle project
Saving sea turtles isn’t the most likely project for an Arkansas Girl Scout, but it earned Conway’s Juliana Ferrer the gold. The 17-year-old St. Joseph High School graduate earned her Bronze and Silver awards before tackling the Gold Award, the highest honor a Girl Scout can achieve. Fewer than 6 percent of all Girl Scouts earn the award, according to girlscouts.org.
“I joined Girl Scouts in second grade, and I was looking to do fun, outdoor things, mainly,” Ferrer said, “all the different camping things — archery and horseback riding and stuff like that.”
Her mother, Karen Ferrer, who earned the Gold Award as a Girl Scout when she was growing up in Ohio, volunteered to become Juliana’s Scout leader.
Juliana said that as soon as she learned about Bronze, Silver and Gold awards, “I decided I was going to earn all three awards.”
Her Silver Award project, undertaken with fellow Girl Scout Evelyn Land, was to identify native trees on a trail in Woolly Hollow State Park in Greenbrier and to create a pamphlet on the trees for visitors. When Juliana was a junior in high school, she and some friends earned the Bronze Award by working together on a project.
“We made little puppets for the preschool at St. Joseph and made little outfits for them to [help the kids] learn about different seasons,” she said.
The Gold Award is an individual honor, and Juliana immediately knew what the focus of her project would be.
“As soon as I was starting the Gold Award, I knew I wanted it to be about sea turtles, but I was trying to find a way to make it unique,” she said. Other Girl Scouts in the United States have used the plight of sea turtles as a basis for their projects,
but they had oceans nearby. So why sea turtles?
“I have always been super into the ocean,” Juliana said. “It used to be more about dolphins for me. I went to a sea-turtle rescue center on a family vacation in Florida. I just got really into sea turtles.”
Karen said her husband, Gabe, is from Florida, so the family visits there a lot.
“She’s always loved the ocean,” Karen said of her oldest daughter. “She’s had a dolphin phase; she’s had a manatee phase.”
Also, Juliana worked handson helping protect sea-turtle nests on a Costa Rica beach during a Girl Scout Destinations trip during her sophomore year of high school.
“My main memory would be, it was New Year’s Eve, and we got to see thousands of sea turtles nesting at once,” she said.
The mass nesting in Costa Rica is called arribadas, Spanish for arrival.
“They were all over the beach; you could barely walk without stepping on them,” she said.
Juliana’s Gold Award project, which took two years to complete, focuses on how everyone, no matter where they live, can help sea turtles. The project includes a documentary she made called “Distance Doesn’t Matter: Saving Endangered Sea Turtles,” which is available on YouTube.
“I wrote the music myself,” she said. “I just made it up based on what I thought would sound good.”
She performed the music on her flute and ukulele. She played the flute in high school, and she said she taught herself to play the ukulele, a birthday gift from an uncle, three years ago.
The minimum time spent to complete a Gold Award project is 80 hours; she spent more than 100 hours.
To make the documentary, Juliana talked to experts and found a website that listed “every sea-turtle rescue organization.” She emailed each one and asked for advice on what to include in the documentary.
“I got about 50 responses,” she said. “I used those to make my documentary script.”
Juliana said she also used those sources to get photos and videos that she needed.
People should care about sea turtles for many reasons, she said.
“People need to save sea turtles because they are super vital to the ecosystem and the ocean, and without them, problems can start coming up out of the ocean, on land,” she said. “They do a lot for the environment.
“They help keep coral reefs alive; they help keep beaches stabilized. They also keep the sea bed stabilized, in addition to the beaches on land. The leatherback sea turtles — those are my favorite — they keep the jellyfish population from getting too high because their whole diet is jellyfish.”
The seven species of sea turtles are all on endangered lists as threatened or worse, she said.
The bottom line of the documentary is that people can help save sea turtles by the choices they make.
“I found it surprising that there were actually so many things people could do,” Juliana said. “I wasn’t sure how many things I would be able to tell people to do.
“One of the biggest things people can do is try to reduce the plastic they use. If you get takeout from the restaurant, ask for no silverware. You can take [the food] home and use your own.”
Another suggestion is to “use reusable or paper shopping bags, instead of plastic ones. [Sea turtles] mistake plastic bags for jellyfish sometimes. The less plastic bags that end up in the ocean, the better for [the turtles].” She said people can take their own bags to the grocery store or use paper bags.
“It’s super easy a lot of the time,” she said.
Juliana said her project was not easy — especially because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID did make it harder for the Gold Award because I had planned to lead some environmental cleanups, … so I had to change it to do-your-own cleanups, and I made a website.”
Participants were asked to log details of their cleanups.
Because of the pandemic, Juliana did not get to experience the ceremony that usually goes along with the Gold Award. Instead, she went to the Diamonds of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas Council office in Little Rock to pick up her pin.
“It was super exciting for me because I had been working for a really long time to get that pin,” she said.
The pin is displayed on her Girl Scout vest, with the Bronze and Silver awards underneath it and a slew of other badges she’s earned.
Juliana, the oldest of five children, said two of her younger sisters are involved in Scouts, too. Her 15-year-old sister, Carolina, earned the Silver award, so Juliana expects her to go for the gold someday, and their 5-year-0ld sister, Veronica, just started in Daisies. Juliana has a brother, Daniel, who is a Cub Scout, and another brother, Thomas, who doesn’t participate in Scouting.
Karen said the Gold Award will continue to impact her daughter’s life.
“It’s already helped her, just in the sense that she had amazing things to write about in her college applications on those essays,” she said. “It shows her dedication and how she can work independently, which is nice.”
She said Juliana also worked with people “from around the world” on the project, so she developed a network of people she can contact when it comes time for her to pursue an internship.
The teenager, who will turn 18 on Sept. 9, is at Rollins College in Winter Haven, Florida, planning to major in marine biology.
“That’s a real shocker to everyone,” Juliana said, laughing. “Right now, my plan is I want to go to a vet school that has a specific marine certification so I can be a marine veterinarian, and I plan to work with sea turtles in that way.”
The certificate she received with the Gold Award states, “Your dedication and commitment to making the world a better place is an inspiration to the next generation of leaders.”
She’ll be satisfied with just inspiring people to help save sea turtles.