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Miami Palmetto High School senior Ella Sleeman is Palmetto’s Silver Knight nominee in the area of Science. She highlighted the Thrift for Change shop for her Silver Knight community service project.
Sleeman helped found and organize Thrift for Change to reduce clothing waste.
“Clothing waste ends up in landfills and emits methane,” she says. “It contributes to global warming.”
The thrift shop accepts all types of clothes except underwear and bathing suits. The clothes just need to be wearable.
The thrift shop was started last year, before the COVID restrictions closed the school. The students set up an area under the pavilion at lunch time and manned the area throughout the three lunch periods. After that, the thrift shop was moved online to Instagram.
“People comment if they want the clothes and we give it to them in a socially distant manner,” she says. “They can give us clothes. It’s an exchange process so no clothing is wasted.”
Even teachers got involved, picking up some clothes and donating as well.
“Anyone can donate,” she says. “When we were in school last year, they would donate it in environmental science class. We just recycled around the school and brainstormed ways to help find way to reduce our school’s carbon footprint and make our school more environmentally friendly.”
She’s taken Advanced Placement Environmental Science and AP Solar Science, which has helped her be a strong advocate for the environment. In fact, she became a certified climate speaker and took part in the Aspen Challenge, which was started by the Bezos family.
She’s worked on sustainability and reducing carbon emissions. She has also been an advocate of getting Palmetto to compost more.
At school, Sleeman heads the environmental outreach chair for the Student Senate. She is the marketing chief for Tutoring for Tomorrow, the student run non-profit organization.
She’s co-president of the Science National Honor Society and has participated in a number of science competitions including Envirothon, Chemathon, the Fairchild Challenge and the Lexus Eco-Challenge. She also competed in the Astronaut Challenge, where the team went to the Kennedy Space Center and did simulations. Her competition experience includes History Bowl.
She’s also co-captain of the badminton team, a member of the National Honor Society and the secretary of Amnesty International.
“We wrote letters to governments to get justice for human rights,” she says.
She and her brother, Carson, founded R.E.D. (Racial Equality Demanded) Miami, a non-profit that donates school supplies to under resourced students.
They received donations that enabled them to buy 100 backpacks filled with school supplies, homemade masks, hand sanitizers and free tutoring coupons.
“Through this organization we’re going to be doing multiple community service projects,” she says. “This was just the first one.”
The Black Lives Matter protests over the summer inspired her to start the organization.
Sleeman has volunteered with Achieve Miami. She’d go to the participating school on Saturdays to help children improve their reading and writing skills.
So far, Sleeman has been accepted to the University of Florida Honors College. She’s waiting to hear from Brown and the University of Miami.
“I want to go into pre-med track, like chemistry or bio-chemistry, to become a doctor,” she says. “My dad was a surgeon. He’s the director of surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Every now and then I’ll shadow him.”
As a rising sophomore, she took Intro to Public Health and Microbiology Lab at UM because of her interest in medicine.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
