Hohenstein
Nicole Hohenstein, the daughter of Christine and Lloyd Hohenstein of Pleasant Hill, has earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, which will be presented at a Gold Award ceremony in January 2012 in Sacramento. She was honored May 11 by the Creekside Service Unit, Girl Scouts of Northern California, at its annual awards night; the Creekside Service Unit includes Pleasant Hill, Martinez, and parts of Walnut Creek and Concord.
She is a member of Ambassador Girl Scout Troop 30158, under the direction of troop leader Laura McKeegan and guidance of troop Gold Award adviser, Belinda Danielson.
For her Gold Award community service projects, Nicole focused on how to make her community more “green.” As co-organizer, she helped promote, advertise and co-host the sixth annual Pleasant Hill Community Service Day on Sept. 25. By advertising via Facebook, telephones and posters, the event had 300 more volunteers than the previous year. As her own project on Community Service Day, she planned, designed and raised the funds for a bee garden, a 20-foot by 50-foot garden of more than 150 native bee-attracting plants, that she created at Rodgers Ranch in an effort to increase and sustain the bee population in Pleasant Hill — “the number of native bees in Northern California has dropped 30 percent in the past three years,” she said. She directed 60 Boy and Girl Scouts, including a troop of Daisy Girl Scouts (kindergarten and first grade), who volunteered to help her with the final planting.
In addition, she started a recycling program at Pleasant Hill’s Century 16 movie theater. For example, every two weeks, a local pig farmer comes to the theater, picks up the leftover popcorn to take to his farm where he feeds it to his livestock.
Nicole, 17, just completed her junior year at Carondelet High School in Concord.
She received the Jefferson Award in November 2010 at Carondelet for her ongoing work in the community and her efforts to help the environment. She also received the Gold Level award of the President’s Volunteer Service Award for contributing more than 500 hours of community service in 2011 alone.
