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Westminster Christian School senior Madison Davis has earned more than 900 community service hours since beginning high school. For that service, she has won the Presidential Community Service Award three years running.
Most of her hours come from her community service project, Tapping Hearts Club. She chose that name because tap is her favorite form of dance. Davis has danced at Jill Mallory Dance Studio since she was six. She does tap, ballet, jazz and lyrical.
The first big event she worked on was a dance for the Paws4you Howl-O-Ween fundraiser.
“Because of COVID, we did a video,” she says. “We filmed our dance and sent it in, and it was part of the show. That’s the only performance-based thing we do. We will send a few dancers, and a little kids ballet number and a hip-hop number and a tap number.”
The rest of the activities don’t involve dance, but they start at the dance studio.
“We decided to focus on the different events Miami Rescue Mission does,” she says. “They are not performances, they are drives.”
When the dancers arrive at the studio, they see a table set up with decorations and signs about the activity. They include things like Operation Christmas Child. The dancers pick up shoe boxes and information about the gender and age of the child. They go home, pack the shoe box with appropriate items, including toys for a child or hair care items for a teen or beauty items and accessories.
“For Thanksgiving, we do Pack the Pantry,” she says. “We have purple bags. They go home and fill it with canned goods, razors, and body wash. They bring it back and we load it up and take it to the Miami Rescue Mission.”
Participation is high. For each event, they donate a little more than 50 boxes. They passed out the Operation Christmas Child boxes in mid-November and they had to go back and replenish the shoe boxes because they were quickly snapped up.
“We go and pick them all up, we bring them here, and make sure they are all together,” she says. “Miami Rescue Mission will either come collect them or we will bring them there.”
At school, Davis is a member of the Westminster school choir.
“We have a fall concert, a Christmas concert and an end of the year musical revue,” she says.
She’s a member of the World Languages Honor Society, the English National Honor Society, the Science National Honor Society, the National Honor Society, Rho Kappa and Tri-M, the music honor society. She is also an Emerald Scholar.
The summer before junior year, she attended the FBI Youth Leadership Academy.
“We learned about cases and what the FBI does,” she says. “The part that I enjoyed the most was learning about the counter terrorism branch. I’m very interested in domestic terrorism and foreign terrorism. I’m interested in government.”
This past April, she worked in the Messenger Program for the Florida House of Representatives. She will return in January to work again in the Messenger Program.
Davis is applying to college as a Political Science major. She’s applying to Florida State University, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Tennessee, Clemson and others. She’s already been accepted to the University of Alabama.
She may go on to earn her law degree.
Davis loves to read murder mysteries so for her Advanced Placement Capstone program she did a report on “Whether True Crime Podcasts Are Likely to Make Adolescents Victim Blamed or More Prepared.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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