Gold Award Girl Scout Kai Yamamoto wasn’t sure she’d attend the Girl Scouts of Orange County’s Green and Gold Award Ceremony. She had other plans for the date.

But the day before the event, Yamamoto received an email from Lesley Finch, the Girl Scouts’ Awards Specialist, “strongly recommending” that she RSVP for the June 9 event.

Per Finch’s recommendation, Yamamoto attended the ceremony, held at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. With her mother and sister watching, Yamamoto was called on stage to receive the Girl Scouts of the USA’s 2024 Gold Award Scholarship.

“It was really exciting, and I was really surprised. I felt this wave of excitement and joy,” Yamamoto said, ” My work was being recognized.”

Each year, Girl Scouts of the USA awards one Gold Award Girl Scout a $5,000 scholarship, in recognition of their Gold Award project. Successful projects demonstrate “extraordinary leadership and measurable, sustainable impact and address issues of national and/or global significance.”

Girl Scouts earn Gold Award status — the highest award — by completing two projects where they use their skills to make a difference in their community.

For her Gold Award project, Yamamoto, 18, spearheaded the creation of an Asian American & Pacific Islander ethnic studies course offered by California State Long Beach since February 2022.

The five-credit, semester-long AAPI ethnic studies course explores “contemporary issues impacting Asian and Asian Americans’ relationship to racial formation and racial hierarchy,” according to the course description, paying special attention to the collective roles and transformations of each ethnic group in the U.S.

The course also touches on contemporary concerns and struggles for liberation as well as women’s experiences to draw parallels between modes of domination in race and gender.

To design the course, Yamamoto collaborated with Long Beach Unified School District, CSULB and college professors. The course and all of its lesson plans are also offered as a free resource by Diversify Our Narrative, a student-led nonprofit that seeks to forge an “anti-racist future through education.”

In her freshman year at Millikan High School in Long Beach, Yamamoto noticed a lack of AAPI-inclusive curriculum at her school.

“There was nothing available in my high school,” said Yamamoto, “There was nothing I could take that centralized AAPI history and culture.”

That year, she helped to design a course, and later enrolled in the class as a sophomore.

With her course, Yamamoto hoped to create a “space of acceptance” for both AAPI and other ethnic communities.

While creating the course, Yamamoto was also informed by her own experiences with Asian American discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was scared, my family was scared. We didn’t want to leave our house, but when we did, we didn’t want to sneeze or cough for fear of what other people might say or do,” she said.

“I know as more people are getting educated about cultures, they can separate the stereotypes from the actual facts,” she said.

Yamamoto has been a Girl Scout with Troop 881 in Anaheim for over 13 years, since she was 5 years old. Born in China and adopted by Japanese-American parents, the program and the Gold Award Project helped Yamamoto discover her own identity.

“My parents are third-generation, so the language and a lot of their traditions have died out and so I wasn’t able to fully immerse myself in culture growing up,” said Yamamoto. “I don’t speak Mandarin; I don’t speak my own language. I miss that part of myself and this course was a part of self-discovery.”

Yamamoto is heading to UC Berkeley in the fall where she plans on double majoring in political science and international relations. She hopes to minor in AAPI studies. The scholarship award will help with tuition costs.

As she moves on to her college education, Yamamoto’s passions continue to be rooted in the AAPI community.

“I want to continue to be active in this type of work. I’ll make the most out of my AAPI community at Berkeley,” she said.

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