Ava Van Straten (Photo courtesy of Scouts BSA Voyageur District of the Bay-Lakes Council)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – She’s back at it. WTAQ brought you the story of Ava Van Straten’s first book, Mary’s Heart, earlier this year. Now the 17-year-old Notre Dame Academy senior has been named the first female Eagle Scout in the Voyageur District of the Bay-Lakes Council.
Van Straten joined Scouts BSA in February of 2019, the first month when girls were allowed to join the organization as rank-earning scouts. She will be named in the national inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts in February of 2021.
In addition, Van Straten is also the recipient of the prestigious Gold Award from Girl Scouts of the USA. Having both awards as a female now places Van Straten in an even more elite group nationally.
“It is definitely a surreal feeling being able to achieve this rank, and it really taught me a lot along the way,” Van Straten told WTAQ News. “With camping, with random traits and the merit badges – wood carving, swimming – I’m really grateful just for the opportunity to see this all the way through.”
While earning the achievements and learning life skills like other Eagle Scouts, she also had to put together an Eagle Project. The goal of that project is to spread another important life skill, empathy, to even more youth across the area.
So she stuck with something she knew would accomplish just that. Writing a children’s book with a coinciding curriculum. The book and curriculum promote empathy awareness during a time of less in-person interactions and increased use of screens and technology.
“It’s an effective way for children to understand empathy and then the curriculum helps them develop it into their own life,” Van Straten explained. “It’s very hard to communicate in a children’s book, because empathy is such a complex issue. I struggled with writing this book to make it effective. I think I went through about twenty drafts.”
But she did find a way to get her point across.
“I explained it through taking in empathy with your eyes and having a river flowing from your eyes your heart. You have to unblock that river to really understand and take in when you see and feel it in your heart,” Van Straten said. “Seeing what someone is going through and being able to understand what they’re going through – before you can show kindness and compassion to them, you first have to understand what they’re going through.”
Unlike her previous publication, which was originally drafted when she was in fifth grade – Parker’s Path took a different route.
“This story was a fresh new idea that I had, and I had a very set vision of the story that I was planning. But sometimes the visions in my head didn’t always transfer right onto paper…So it was a little bit more of a process accepting that my original vision wouldn’t be able to be translated completely into a children’s book,” Van Straten said. “This project was very complicated, as with COVID, there was a lot of different things that we had to manage. Especially, there were delays in shipping and printing…We had lots of people that if they were driving to certain places they would take a box of books that was mainly with the help of donors and volunteers and I really could not have done it without them.”
Through a grant from The Pollination Project, 4,000 copies of Parker’s Path will be distributed for free to Wisconsin schools, libraries, scouting troops and non-profit groups. If your organization or school wants to request a copy, send an email to MoreByAva@gmail.com.
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