Clayton Junior is Semi-Finalist in Huggable Heroes Competition

Clayton High School junior Carly Beard is one of 80 young social entrepreneurs being recognized for helping make their community and the world a better place.

Beard earned Girl Scout's highest honor, the Gold Award, with her throughMYeyes project.

Now it's winning her wider recognition through the Build-A-Bear Workshop^® Huggable Heroes^® program.

Beard's project is an online compilation of video interviews she conducted of folks going back as far as the 1940s. The site is organized by decade, from the 1930s to the 2000s.

Her interest in oral history began in eighth grade when a man gave a first-person account of his life during segregation in the 1960s. Beard said his speech fueled her interest in history, especially individual stories.

“Textbooks teach history differently than how individuals really experience it,” Beard said.

She's a semi-finalist in the Huggable Heroes^® contest and in two more cuts would be a finalist.

That would help her expand the throughMYeyes network to more students, to learn from it and potentially conduct and contribute interviews of their own.

On the site, Beard has also created a page that shares details and advice as to how a student can go about doing her own interview.

One of her most memorable interviews is of a Mengele twin, a subject of an experiment of Dr. Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany. She also has local interviews, and continues to look for more.

See more on Patch:

• Ward Three Creme de la Clayton Honorees