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In March, Miami Palmetto High School senior Amanda Collazo created a non-profit called Earth SOS Miami.
“I’ve always liked animals,” she says. “This (past) year in the summer, I was looking to see what I could do to help them out since many are going extinct.”
So, she participated in a beach clean-up. She liked the beach clean-ups so much, she created Earth SOS Miami.
“I do them monthly,” she says. “The first one was at Bill Baggs Florida State Park. I love going out there.
The clean-ups are so well attended she thinks she went over the limit of 40 attendees by four or five. The volunteers go in for free to clean up the beach. The first clean-up resulted in 195 pounds of debris. The volunteers picked up anything that doesn’t belong in nature.
“It was always from 9-11 a.m.,” she says. “We would go around the beach and park and come back at 11. We always do them at Bill Baggs but we are also trying to do them at other places like Virginia Key.”
Information is posted on Instagram, flyers are put out and a sign-up sheet is posted.
“We’ve always gotten at least 30 people coming,” she says. “There are one or two people that are regular visitors. Most of the time they are new people, and they are super pumped to clean the beach.”
She says she started the organization because she noticed there were so many environmental organizations and accounts but they were focused on only one specific activity, like clean-ups, planting a tree, etc.
“I wanted to create an easily accessible hub containing all sorts of environmentally-related volunteering events and infographics.”
Collazo has also hosted an eco-friendly donation drive for Lotus House.
“We make an Amazon Wish List,” she says. “We look for items like bamboo towels that are eco-friendly. We look for the label Climate Pledge Friendly.”
The items are sent directly to Lotus House. She promoted the fundraiser on Instagram and will include Palmetto’s Key Club once club activities get going. She is the Key Club assistant webmaster.
She became aware of environmental concerns because her biology teacher talked about them often. Since then, she’s not only started the non-profit, she’s also become a CLEO Climate Action Lab Leader and a Certified Climate Speaker for the Climate Leadership Information Program (CLIP), and took an environmental, dual-enrollment class in the summer at Miami-Dade.
At school, Collazo is a member of the Biology Club, the Italian National Honors Society, Amnesty International, Psi Alpha Honor Society (psychology club), Interact Club, the National Art Honors Society, the Palmetto Women’s Union, the Science National Honors Society, and the Palmetto Animal Welfare Society – PAWS.
For fun, Collazo paints, using oil or acrylic on canvas. She took Advanced Placement Art History last year and loved the class. She also watches Bob Ross painting videos.
Collazo is thinking of majoring in Environmental and Interior Design or pursuing psychiatry.
“I am passionate about the environment and art, so I think Environmental and Interior Design could really fit into those two interests of mine,” she says. “But I’m also very interested in researching how psychedelics affect the mind which fits into psychiatry.”
Collazo is participating in Posse and is a semi-finalist. The schools from Posse she’s interested in are Syracuse University, Pomona College, and Franklin & Marshall College.
Apart from Posse, Collazo’s interested in applying to Tufts University, the University of Miami, the University of South Florida, and the University of Florida.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
