Ava Takesky has been pointing a camera at something since she was old enough to sell Thin Mints.
The Hauppauge High School sophomore is already producing her own video series, “A Media Girl’s Guide to…,” and has used it to cover everything from the annual Girl Scout Cookie Sale to a food insecurity project at the Community Pantry at Suffolk JYCC. She’s 15, she edits her own footage, and she didn’t wait for a class assignment to start doing any of it.
That kind of self-directed hustle doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Takesky traces it back to filming Girl Scout cookie videos as a Daisy, the youngest level of Girl Scout membership, where she discovered that making something on camera felt natural. Teaching herself to edit came next, then the Media Girls program, which she said felt like an obvious destination the moment she heard about it.
The program puts young scouts into journalism and media production roles, covering real events and real community issues. For Takesky, it meant handling a camera at public events and eventually walking into the Girl Scout headquarters in New York City as a candidate for a marketing campaign. She didn’t get selected. She’s not bitter about it.
“Even though I wasn’t selected in the end, the experience taught me an important lesson about persistence,” Takesky said. “Instead of feeling discouraged, I walked away feeling more confident and motivated to keep trying new opportunities.”
That’s not a line from a college application essay. That’s what the work actually produced. Getting cut from something and coming away with more confidence than you started with is a specific kind of education, and it’s not one you can get sitting in a classroom.
Her project at the Community Pantry at Suffolk JYCC pushed her into different territory. Food insecurity isn’t an abstract policy debate when you’re interviewing a coordinator face to face about who’s actually showing up for help. Takesky said the experience opened her eyes to the scale of the problem in her own Suffolk County neighborhood, that hunger hits more local families than most people assume. Long Island Press covered her work in depth, including her reflections on what that interview changed for her.
She doesn’t work alone. Takesky has built several projects alongside her friend Mia Tencic, and the collaboration is deliberate. The two have complementary instincts. Takesky runs hot creatively; Tencic is calmer. They brainstorm together and then divide the labor based on what each one does better.
“Working together makes trying new things a lot less intimidating,” Takesky said. “I think that it’s always easier and more entertaining when you have someone by your side.”
That’s a lesson most journalists learn eventually. The lone-wolf reporter is mostly a myth. Good coverage usually involves at least two people arguing about the right angle.
Takesky has also been managing a sketch club, which she describes as a leadership experience that got her thinking about what she wants to attempt for her Girl Scout Gold Award, the organization’s highest honor, which requires a sustained community impact project. She’s a sophomore. The Gold Award is still a couple of years out. But she’s already thinking about the shape of the thing, which puts her ahead of most adults when it comes to long-range planning.
Her broader concern is one worth taking seriously. She believes the arts get overlooked in favor of sports and academic programs when it comes to opportunities for young people. Given the state of arts funding in most Suffolk County school districts, she’s not wrong. Budgets get tight, music and studio programs get trimmed first, and kids who don’t play a sport or score in the 90th percentile often find there’s not much structured space for them.
The Girl Scouts of America has run programs like Media Girls specifically to fill some of that gap, giving young women a structured path into storytelling, journalism, and production work before they’re old enough to intern anywhere. Takesky is the argument for why that investment makes sense.
She started filming cookie sales as a seven-year-old and is now producing documentary-style community journalism as a 15-year-old. The through line is consistent: find the story, point the camera, figure out the edit. Whatever she produces for her Gold Award project, the infrastructure for doing it seriously is already in place.