Scout’s Honor
By Mark Loehrke
Appears in the December 2024 issue.
Personal experience helps inspire local Girl Scout’s mental health website
By the time the pandemic hit in early 2020, Aurora native Kameryn Rasberry already had a pretty good idea of what it was like to deal with anxiety and emotional stress—she just suddenly had a lot more company among her high school peer group.
As a heart transplant recipient several years earlier at the age of 12, Kameryn was at that time not only dealing with the physical issues associated with being hospitalized for more than two months but also the anxiety and depression that went along with the tense wait for a new heart. Looking for some calm amid that storm, she began walking every day, eating healthier meals, and doing yoga to help alleviate the anxiety she was feeling and lift her spirits. Those practices also buoyed her when she went through treatment for post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder, a life-threatening complication of organ transplants.
A Girl Scout since age 5, Kameryn decided to channel her desire to help other kids dealing with mental health challenges into a Scout project. Working with project adviser Karla Hargrove, a therapist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University, she created a website designed to promote a holistic approach to mental health. Offering tools and techniques to empower teens to achieve and maintain mental well-being, the site—Achieving Mental Wellness Through Physical Exercise, Healthy Eating and Coping Mechanisms—eventually earned Kameryn a Gold Award, one of the Girl Scouts’ most prestigious honors.
She thought those same coping mechanisms might be helpful to others experiencing similar feelings during the abrupt period of isolation and uncertainty. “When the pandemic began, I started to feel a lot of anxiousness again but soon realized I wasn’t alone,” she explains. “Many teens were going through the same mental health struggle in what was becoming a global epidemic.”
“I fell in love with Kameryn’s idea of having a central hub that promotes having a healthy body to support a healthy mind,” says Hargrove, who helped brainstorm ideas, offered feedback, and provided evidence-based articles on mental health topics and coping techniques to assist with the project. “Kameryn embodies a natural empathy and compassionate leadership style that seeks to help others improve the quality of their well-being, and I was grateful for the opportunity to assist her in increasing awareness for teens who may have similar experiences to her in terms of understanding and improving their mental-emotional health.”
Now a graduate of Oswego East High School, Kameryn looks forward to once again helping others as she works toward a career in public health and medicine as a freshman at Loyola University Chicago. But in the meantime, she hopes teens looking for mental health resources and support continue to discover the interactive tools, peer stories, and expert insights available on her website. More importantly, she hopes they realize they’re not alone.
“Mental health is a subject that’s near to my heart, which is why I’m happy other teens have another resource to help them feel more confident and supported in their own journeys,” she says.
Visit Kameryn’s Gold Award–winning site at sites.google.com/view/kameryngsgoldmentalwellness.
Photos: Kameryn Rasberry
