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Episode #584 of Hometown Heroes, airing July 11-14, 2019, continues the World War II memories of Purple Heart recipient Richard Grantham of Arroyo Grande, CA. If you missed the first part of the 93-year-old’s story last time, you can access episode #583 here.

This episode begins, however, with the voice of a much younger American. 17-year-old Katie Chien will soon begin her senior year at Clovis North HS in central California. She recently was recognized with the highest honor given by the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Girl Scout Gold Award, for her efforts to create a searchable online database of the veterans oral history interviews heard on Hometown Heroes.

“In the textbooks, it’s very general, it’s thousands of soldiers,” Chien says of what she’s learned about World War II in school. “Hometown Heroes, it’s the specific veterans, and it’s the actual soldiers that it’s talking about in the textbooks.”

The California County Educational Technology Consortium (CCETC) had expressed interest in hosting Hometown Heroes episodes on the CaliforniaStreaming online platform, but it was clear that the project would require hour upon hour of painstaking data entry. When then 15-year-old Katie expressed a desire to build her Gold Award project around making veterans’ stories more accessible for students, John Lenko and Susan Pennell of CCETC provided the perfect method for her to do just that.

Chien worked on the project for more than a year and a half, pacing herself so she could still keep up with school and extracurricular activities, all the while receiving patient advice from her Gold Award mentor, Dr. Carol Fry Bohlin. In addition to the searchable database, with keywords entered for each episode, the teenager put together a detailed primer for anyone who decides to carry on her efforts in the future. Her primary motivation was to “bring awareness to what these veterans have done for our country, and the difference they have made.” Listen to this episode to hear more from Katie about how she accomplished her goal, and what difference she hopes her efforts will make in the future.

“She did a superb job,” says CCETC’s John Lenko, noting the “tangible” value of being able to hear a veteran’s unique story in his own voice. “Katie has unlocked that resource to those students and educators from here on out in California.”

Listening to and archiving 250 episodes left Chien with a broader base of historical knowledge, but also some powerful perspective.

“Some of our problems as teenagers right now, such as if we have cell service,” you’ll hear Katie remark. “Compared to what some of these college-aged, even younger than college-aged veterans went through… it’s way more serious and way more impactful than what many of us go through now.”

Supported by her parents, Allen and Renee, and sister Nicole, Katie balances a very intense schedule that also includes serving as the business coordinator for her high school robotics team, and completing a month-long summer immersion program at the University of Southern California. The pace she maintains is fierce, but her Gold Award project with the veterans’ interviews helped her understand the value of slowing down.

“In the long run, it was really humbling because it taught me to listen,” you’ll hear Chien reflect. “That’s the best way to learn sometimes: to sit down, slow down your life, and listen to other people and the wise words they have to say, especially from these veterans who are starting to pass.”

Listen to Hometown Heroes to hear which veteran’s story made the strongest impression on this prodigious Girl Scout. She earned her Gold Award, she established a method for sustaining the project, she learned much more than she possibly could from a textbook, and she also drew some inspiration, both from individual veterans’ stories, and the collective theme that emerges from the tapestry of their experiences.

“If those young veterans could make a change back then,” Katie says. “Then people my age can make a change now.”