Miami Palmetto High School senior Annika Adamo is committed to community service. She has been working with fellow Palmetto student O’Neill Cooper on a program called Green Roof Initiative.
“We have been conducting research on green roof models,” she says. “I write lectures. We are working with the Village of Palmetto Bay Youth Council on what green roofs are and why they are so good for the environment.”
Adamo competed against Cooper in the Innovate to Mitigate, an environmental competition. Afterward Cooper invited her to join his team.
“My team got first place,” she says. “We made a series of power points about recycling and we went to West Lab Elementary School and taught it to fourth graders. We did an educational series.”
Adamo says she finds environmental outreach the most interesting part of advocating for the environment about green roofs.
“It’s so cool and important to be able to talk to people,” she says. “It’s not just that it’s great for the earth, it also saves you money.”
She says it’s important for them to have public lectures and include the history of green roofs.
“I learned about the history of green roofs when I went to Norway,” she says. “It has historical uses.”
Adamo says it’s also important to highlight the economic side of the equation. While green roofs aren’t cheap to start, they do save a lot of cooling costs.
“I get to work with people who have different perspectives than I do,” she says.
While going out and advocating for green roofs, she says she hasn’t run into anyone who has been completely adverse.
“I don’t think they know how necessary it is to deal with climate change,” she says.
Especially in South Florida. She says here it’s miserably hot and there are other issues made worse by climate change.
“You go to the Keys and there is coral bleaching,” she says.
While they are talking to students about green roofs, they are also focusing on informing homeowners as well. They are also talking with Fairchild Tropical Garden about the topic and they are reaching out to folks in Coral Gables and the Palmetto Bay Mini Series.
Currently the initiative is focusing on big businesses that have a lot of flat space on top because it can lower the cooling costs for those businesses.
Along with her work on green roofs, her volunteer work includes tutoring freshmen students for AP World History.
“I’ve had really big groups and small groups.” She says. “I think history is so important.
Learning history is a skill and it’s not easy. I love teaching people history and how to recognize correlations. It doesn’t matter how long ago something happens, it affects what happens today.”
She finds it rewarding to help the freshman students begin to understand those correlations and how they play into modern politics and global relationships.
Adamo also tutored AP Human Geography and AP Art History.
She’s a member of the National Art Honor Society, vice president of competitions for the National Science Honor Society, and treasurer of the Photography Club.
She enjoys taking pictures of street scenes and landscapes.
Adamo is the vice president of STEM GEMS, the Gender Equality Mentorship, a program run by a friend.
“We go to Gulfstream Elementary School and we take science projects and experiments,” she says. “We try to interest the kids in science. Women can and should be involved in STEM.”
Adamo’s college application list includes the University of Georgia, the University of Virginia, Wake Forest University, Vanderbilt University, and Emory University. She wants to be a history major.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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