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After more than a decade without a Gold Award Girl Scout, Service Unit 34 in Caroline County now boasts two. A 2026 graduate of North Caroline High School, Girl Scout Linda Ridgell of Denton finished her Gold Award project in late summer, ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline. Her twin sister Danielle completed her Gold Award project in the spring.
They are members of Troop 154 of Preston, led by Mona Ferris. “I knew I wanted to do something with children,” Linda said. She decided on a project to benefit patients at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington, Del. Her project advisor Hilary Bruno is the director of creative arts therapy and school programs for the Child Life Department, which helps patients and families cope with medical experiences through play, preparation, education, and self-expression activities, according to the hospital website, and those are the areas Linda’s project focused on.
Linda said she wanted to help the hospitalized children be less afraid and to help build their confidence. Her project took a three-prong approach: creating medical play dolls and gowns, making craft kits, and conducting a book drive.
Each rag doll provides a companion for the child, and doctors can use dolls to demonstrate what procedure a child might need and what must be done for them to be healthy, Linda said. The dolls and gowns were all created by volunteers, and Linda delivered 86 dolls and 99 doll gowns to the hospital by the time her project was done.
“Going in, I did not know how to sew, and now I know how,” Linda said. She credited her new-found knowledge to Victoria McConnell, president of the Fiber Arts Center of the Eastern Shore (FACES) in Denton. McConnell taught her how to cut out patterns for the dolls and gowns
and how to use a sewing machine to stitch them together. McConnell and volunteers from FACES helped make dolls and gowns, along with Cadet Troop 363 of Greensboro; also, seamstress Cathy Toomey of Federalsburg donated gowns and helped with the dolls, Linda said.
She said Terri Mullikin with Girl Scouts, who helped her with the criteria she had to meet to get her project ideas approved, also donated fabric markers for use with the dolls, so children and their doctors can use them to illustrate emotions and injuries. Funding for the project was provided by a donation from American Legion Post 29, Linda said.
The second part of the project was creating individual kits containing supplies needed to make Band-Aid butterflies, wooden keychains, pressed flower bookmarks, affirmation bracelets, and Q-tip X-rays, with the idea being to help normalize medical things, Linda explained. With the help of the NCHS Leo Club, she produced and delivered more than 220 craft kits to the children’s hospital.
For the third part of her project, Linda organized a book drive, creating an Amazon wish list of medically themed books and inspiring stories to be donated. She said they made sure to include books for older children, who often aren’t considered. Altogether, she collected a total of 63 books.
Linda delivered part of the items to Nemours in June and the remainder in August. When she went for the final delivery, Linda said she got a lot of positive feedback from the nurses, who told her how much the children were enjoying the dolls and craft kits.
The Girl Scout Gold Award is the highest achievement in Girl Scouting, similar to the Eagle Award in Scouting America. The award requires a Girl Scout to design and execute a minimum 80-hour Take Action project. Only about 5.4% of all Girl Scouts complete their Gold Award, according to Girl Scouts of the USA.
Before Gold, Linda and Danielle already earned the Girl Scout Silver and Bronze awards with their troops. For their Silver Award, they did a garden at Caroline County Humane Society in Ridgely and built an outdoor agility obstacle course for the dogs. For their Bronze Award, they collected toys and books for the children’s ward at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis. “It’s super exciting,” Ferris said of the twins earning their Gold Awards. “We hadn’t had one in at least 10 years. The Gold Award is very much just the girls. It’s very cool. They are very determined and driven girls.”
Linda and Danielle are the daughters of Kristen and Douglas Ridgell of Denton. They have an older brother, Eric. “I’m very proud of her. She did not give up,” Linda’s mom Kristen
said. “She was very determined to earn her Gold Award. She went out of her comfort zone, and she rose above all the challenges.” Those challenges included planning other projects before finally getting Council approval for the Nemours project.
The 80 hours required for the project are just a minimum, and fitting it into one’s senior year was a difficult balance with school demands and sports. “I’m very glad it’s over. It was very stressful,” Kristen said, but hearing the hospital staff talk about how much the children loved everything made up for it.
Linda joined Girl Scouts as a Daisy. She said her favorite activities were holiday overnights at Camp Todd, kayaking on the Sassafras River, and giving back to the community. She is a freshman at Salisbury University, majoring in exercise science. She plans a career in pediatric occupational therapy. Both girls will be recognized in a ceremony at Camp Todd in January.
