Capping off her dozen years with the Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvania, Lily Sassani has not only completed a project that pays tribute to the organization that shaped her—and where her mom, Rachel Sassani, is her troop leader—but also illuminates a little-known aspect of Girls Scouts’ activism.

For her Gold Award project, the highest achievement available to Girl Scouts, Sassani created the Holocaust Education Girl Scout Patch. To earn the badge, interested Girl Scouts must complete a corresponding curriculum, crafted largely by Sassani, that includes engaging with material about Holocaust resistance, connecting with survivors or their stories and taking some kind of action to educate their local communities.

Sassani’s effort is the fruit of a two-and-a-half-year collaboration with the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. It came out of the 18-year-old’s desire to shine a light on the Holocaust, especially “the resistance efforts of the Girl Guides of Europe and [their affiliated] Girl Scouts in America,” Sassani said, “because that’s part of the Holocaust that not a lot of people get educated about.”

The only Jewish student at her high school in New Kensington, a Pittsburgh suburb, Sassani learned about the little-known Holocaust connection to scouting from a book, How Girl Guides Won the War, by Jamie Hampton—whom the Holocaust center later arranged for Sassani to interview.

The center also connected Sassani to survivor Edith Leuchter, who had been a Girl Guide in France during the war and today lives in Florida, as well as her Pittsburgh-based daughter, Deborah Leuchter Stueber. It also helped arrange for a University of Pittsburgh professor to review materials for the curriculum.

Supported by grants from the Jewish Women’s Foundation of Greater Pittsburgh, Sassani worked for nearly a year to design and produce the patch itself. “I’m incredibly proud to be part of something that can help a generation of young women see themselves as upstanders and changemakers,” said Emily Loeb, the Holocaust center’s program director.

For her part, Sassani, who will study visual communications at Penn State in the fall, hopes that her curriculum and patch “can bring Girl Scouts closer with their local Holocaust centers or local survivors.” She’s also been gratified to hear from people on social media who have told her, “I’m a survivor, or someone in my family was a survivor, and we’re so happy to see something like this.”

“It warms my heart,” Sassani added, “that people connect with it, and it’s especially personal to me.”