Coral Gables resident Daniela Bond is a senior at the School for Advanced Studies on the Kendall Campus of Miami Dade College. Bond transferred to the school her junior year from Our Lady of Lourdes Academy.
Before she left Lourdes, Bond and three friends started Girl Print, an organization to empower girls.
“This year we’re going to implement a mentorship program,” Bond said. “We’re still working on contacting a group of middle school-aged girls. Two of us, last year, tutored girls for the FCAT but we want to do more than tutoring. Once a month we would take these girls to an art museum.”
They hope to help a diverse group of 20-25 girls that would normally not meet if it weren’t for the Girl Print program.
“For the mentorship program we would enlist friends,” she said.
The group also has fundraised to help girls.
“We had an event at Tropical Park and we raised more than $2,000,” she said. “People were selling cupcakes, clothes; we had the Lourdes singers. One of the girls who started this with me does Tae Kwon Do, so they had a little performance.”
That event took place in October 2014. The group hopes to have a similar event in March 2016 for International Woman’s Day.
In addition to that project, Bond is the chair liaison of the Miami-Dade Youth Commission.
“We have monthly meetings and we plan different events,” she said. “Right now we are working on International Peace Day.”
Through the Youth Commission, she has become involved in Books for Tots, a program that brings books to schools to be given to students.
“We visit different schools and we read books to them,” she said.
Bond is a member of the National Honor Society, the National English Honor Society and the Spanish National Honor Society.
For college she is looking at schools in the Northeast as well as the University of Miami. She plans to major in communications.
By Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
