Academic achievements, community service, leadership, and/or work experience: 

I have taken on numerous leadership positions, such as, president of the National Honor Society and a Save Promise Officer for two years. In these organizations, I led two food drives that collected 60+ donations each, created hundreds of cards for Golisano’s Children’s Hospital, and made dog toys for local animal shelters. Additionally, I am president of the National English Honor Society where I educate students on famous authors, create gifts for nursing homes, and make bookmarks for elementary schools. As Vice-President of the Math Honor Society, I help run the math tutoring services in my school. 

Outside of school, I am chair of the Cape Coral Youth Council, and our goal is to create projects that benefit the youth. Some of our projects include bi-monthly road cleanups, a School Reach Out Project that educates high schoolers on local government, a book drive for Golisano’s Children Hospital, a toy drive for Children’s Network, a mental health survey for teens, and a Movie-In-The-Park event for teens. I was also an active volunteer for the Cape Coral Library and received 140 volunteer hours for helping the youth librarians. Lastly, I also am a weekly volunteer in Lee County Teen Court where I have helped 15 juvenile offenders, so far, rehabilitate. 

When it comes to work experience, I had a job in the summer after sophomore year at the Cape Coral Youth Center as a camp counselor for the 5-year-old group. In this position I single handedly watched around 20 children and made sure they had a safe summer of fun.

When I am outside of class, I spend my time engaging in my passions, while also trying to uplift those around me. One of the main ways I do this is by playing volleyball. I started the sport when I was eleven years old and from that point I played five years of club volleyball, three years of middle school, one year of JV volleyball for my high school, three years of varsity volleyball and one year of beach volleyball. In almost every one of these teams I was captain. I won the Captain’s Award.

As a resident of Cape Coral, describe an issue facing our city (or youth) and how you would solve it?

As chair of the Cape Coral Youth Council, I have spent the last two years researching and communicating with citizens to discover the most pressing problem affecting our youth and city. One of those prominent issues is the minimal mental health support available to our youth and lack of outlets to improve their mental health. Due to this concern and the platform, I have by being on the Youth Council, I, along with my co-council members, have decided to start tackling these issues now with our very own Mental Health Survey. This survey consists of ten questions

regarding students’ opinions on mental health and the resources they have available in their school. In the month of December, we sent out our survey to Oasis High School and have already received over two-hundred responses. With these results, we spoke directly with the City Council at our yearly joint council meeting and discussed some of the main concerns the youth are having. Another aspect of solving the issues with mental health is providing students outlets to hang out with their peers. I have found that a lot of the reasons students struggle with mental health is because of social media, but if we are able to create more teen spaces, then hopefully teens will be more inclined to be social and stay off their phones. I plan to solve this part of the issue by helping my council put on their first-ever Move-In-The-Park event. This event was created, specifically, for teens, drew over 100 people was a fun way for them to  them to have fun and make new friends from people from different schools than them. Another one of my passions is public speaking. This is why I competed on my school’s speech and debate team for two years, as I was captivated on how to learn how to use my voice to engage an audience. Along with that, I joined Oasis’s musical theater program and performed in the shows Mamma Mia and The Little Mermaid and will perform in Grease in the spring. Additionally, I have learned the strength of my words through my self-written novel. I am not completely finished with it yet. But I have written eighty-one thousand words so far, and my story is about a first-generation girl and her journey through high school. The goal is that when I self publish, I will have created a story that can connect teens together.  

What is your passion and how did you discover it?

Growing up my father was never quiet when it came to politics. When I was in Mrs. Anderson’s second grade class, I did not understand what was going on in our country. But I was inspired by my dad’s passion and started listening to the news on the 2016 election with him. Over time, I began to research more on candidates and the policies they supported, and our casual conversations turned into civil debates. We discussed opinions from different news sources, such as Washington Post vs BBC, and general motives for different political events, such as the war in Ukraine, since he is from Poland. This meant that by the time I got to high school, I was equally as interested in politics, specifically policy making in privileged and underprivileged areas and knew it was my passion what I wanted to do with my life. However, because I inherited his passion I wanted to do more than just research and start change-making now. That is why once I moved to Florida, I searched for organizations that could help me understand the needs of my new city through service and connect with people from diverse backgrounds. This led me to apply for Youth Council, Teen Court, the library, the Youth Center, and all of my leadership positions at school, because in each group I met with a new demographic of people I could help. For example, at the Youth Center, I could help little kindergartners have a summer full of fun and at the library I could help teens transport into their books through homemade Harry Potter decorations. Through each service project, I fell more in love with helping people and bringing people together, which confirmed my love of politics and desire to work in public service.