Mari Edler, a rising senior at St. Margaret’s, is a passionate artist, Girl Scout, and scuba-diving enthusiast. She loves experimenting with a myriad of different art mediums, ranging from 3D printers to metalworking to jewelry, digital art, VR, and more traditional forms like clay, watercolor, and charcoal. Mari’s confident, can-do attitude and willingness to try new things, as reflected in her broad artistic range, is also shown by her many other diverse interests and hobbies such as programming, wakeboarding, water-skiing, cryptology (the study of languages), and theater (she has been involved in 14 school productions so far!). Next year, Mari is also looking forward to being a part of Admissions Ambassadors, the robotics team, and the Senior Class Co-President of her local NCL (National Charity League) chapter.
Mari’s work with NCL correlates to her love of sharing her talents and helping the people around her. In fact, for the past year, Mari has been hard at work on her Girl Scout Gold Award Project, which is the highest accolade that a Scout can earn. Mari’s project, titled “Mari’s Mindful Masterpieces,” helps get open-exploration art projects, designed by Mari and her team, into the hands of parents for their children at home. Open-exploration art is not a “craft” or set of instructions, it is instead a set of guidelines that enables kids to have a creative outlet and express their imagination without bounds. In a sense, the project is part of the emerging field of art therapy, which uses art and creativity to facilitate emotional healing, instead of talking to a therapist. This is important because traditional therapy is inaccessible to many people, especially children. The forced pandemic-era isolation of children during crucial developmental years amplifies the importance of having therapy-esque options for children. As Mari and her team researched, open-exploration art projects can help mitigate some of the developmental issues brought about in children during the pandemic because they can help kids expand their imaginations, be creative, improve motor skills, and develop skills like imagination-to-product conductivity, or just have fun.
Mari’s art tutorials, which can be found on her Instagram page (@mindful_masterpieces_goldaward) range from paint-and-yarn art, a pom-pom sensory bin, cardboard sculptures, and bubble wrap stamps. When deciding the best way to present her tutorials, Mari decided on the Instagram account to enable her to reach the most parents, be available for people at home, and be sustainable since the projects can stay up on the Internet virtually forever. The Instagram account’s bio also features a Google form where she can collect feedback from parents about her project and how to improve the page. Currently, she has amassed almost 7,000 views on her tutorial videos with the highest being at over 3,000. In addition to the Instagram page, Mari also coordinated with Pretend City Children’s Museum and The Social Institute (TSI). In March she hosted an in-person event at Pretend City, welcoming over 200 kids and families to create some of the projects listed on her page.
In order to arrange all of this, Mari started brainstorming her project in the Summer of 2021, working with Pretend City to cultivate the final idea. Mari began working on her project proposal in the Fall to prepare for her interview with the Girl Scout Council, which had to approve Mari’s proposal for her to move on to the next steps. Mari describes the interview process as very intense, and she had to ensure all potential questions and issues in her idea were vetted out beforehand. Furthermore, the opportunity to interview in front of this council for her Gold Award only came after being a diligent Girl Scout for over 12 years, and earning her Silver and Bronze Awards with her troop in Middle and Elementary School, respectively. Essentially, Mari had to sell a lot of Girl Scout cookies to reach this high of a platform to give back in the biggest way possible.
To close, as a word of advice, Mari urges others to be confident, express their interests and pursue them. She wants teenagers to know that “you define your own high school experience,” and it’s okay if you have a wide variety of activities you enjoy. Ultimately, when trying something new, Mari always remembers the words of Gina Linetti on an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, “Life is chaos, success is completely arbitrary, and confidence is everything,” to chase her dreams unfettered by doubt.
Finally, Mari would like to thank the amazing team of friends that made her project possible, as well as Lauren Geiger (Pretend City) and Lauren Stone (TSI), the project coordinators she worked with.
Check out Mari’s website, Girl Scout project Instagram page, and information on some of her other activities here!:
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