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Six years ago, Westminster Christan School senior Dylan Maier and her brother Devin started a club called Connect4Cancer. She took over the reins as president when her brother graduated two years ago.
“We help kids fighting cancer,” she says. “We make visits to Ronald McDonald House. We usually do arts and crafts with them and spend time with them. There are kids of all different ages. Four-year-olds, and some my age.”
The teens will stay for up to two hours interacting with the kids who are staying there while receiving treatment.
Maier says they fundraise, sometimes selling hot chocolate at school and they ask for donations of toys for Christmas and Easter to make the kids at Ronald McDonald House happy.
Club members go to Ronald McDonald House twice a month. They kept up even during COVID. At that time, they couldn’t go in and interact with the kids, but they make goody bags with art supplies that they would drop off so the kids could have things to do.
The visits not only make the sick kids happy, but the volunteers. Maier says she likes getting to know the children.
“It’s so crazy how some of them are my age,” she says.
She enjoys seeing how happy the younger kids are with the simplest things.
At school, she’s in Heartstrings, a community service program of Tri-M, the music honor society. She’s played violin since second grade.
“We did live concerts at local retirement homes,” she says. “We’d go after school every couple of weeks to visit them. They would all have chairs, set up and watch us play.”
The musicians visited East Ridge Retirement Home and the Palace at Kendall.
“During COVID for Heartstring, we would make videos for their birthdays,” she says. “We would say happy birthday to acknowledge them and then we would play a piece for them.
Just so they could feel special for their birthdays since we couldn’t visit.”
She’s also an Orchestra Buddy, which is a music tutor.
“After school, we can tutor middle school students or elementary school kids,” she says.
The volunteers go to the orchestra room and the younger students who need help come in and ask for help. The sessions are usually one on one. They help the kids with pieces they have trouble with and help them practice for concerts.
She plays soccer and lacrosse at school. She’s been on the varsity lacrosse team since sophomore year and this year she’s on the varsity soccer team. She was the team captain of the junior varsity team last year.
Her college applications included Florida State University, Clemson, Southern Methodist University, Syracuse and the University of Miami. She’s interested in a career in interior design.
Her community service outside of school includes a Blue Missions trip to the Dominican Republic where they laid pipes to bring water to a remote village.
“We had a water day and all the people from the village came,” she says. “We had the water coming down and they all drank from the water.”
Last year she joined an organization called Fight Like a Kid.
“We just put together Easter baskets so that kids fighting cancer would have Easter baskets to open,” she says.
Maier was a member of the community service organization Students Offering Support for a couple of years.
“We would clean up local beaches and we would clean sail boats for a charity called Shake-a-Leg.”
She is a member of Twenty Little Working Girls, another community service organization.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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