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Westminster Christan School senior Rebekah Lugo created a community service organization called Living for Giving while still in elementary school.
The roots of the organization started when she was five, when she collected toys at her fifth birthday party to donate to needy children.
“The next year we had a Halloween party and collected art supplies that were donated to Jars of Hearts for cancer patients in the hospital,” she says.
The art supplies helped keep the children occupied while in the hospital.
“Through that, I’ve grown a love for service,” she says. “I’ve noticed the smallest thing can make a difference. The projects that are most dear to me are those with food. I am so surprised on how much food insecurity there is around our own community.”
Living for Giving gives her fellow students a way to do community service. One of her main projects takes place at school during lunch hour.
“I think we were able to pack over 400 bags of weekend meals for kids,” she says.
Because it was at lunchtime, approximately 100 students helped fill bags after eating lunch. Many students only had time to pack one bag, but some did more.
The bags contained single-serve macaroni and cheese, gummy beats, soup, oatmeal, and snacks. Caring for Miami distributed the weekend meals to kids with food insecurity.
This school year she’s planning to do another packing event in March or April.
Another Living for Giving project was making sandwiches for the children at the Homestead Chapman Partnership for the Homeless facility for summer field trip program.
“For five weeks, I would pack a sandwich for them with a cookie and chips and deliver it to them,” she says.
Lugo made 85 ham and cheese or turkey and cheese sandwiches each week for five weeks at a cost of $400 a week. Her family paid $800 for two of the weeks and she found sponsors for three weeks.
Lugo is a Junior Orange Bowl Junior Ambassador board member.
“I’ve been part of the committee since freshman year,” she says.
Community service is part of the program for the junior ambassadors, and they also help with events.
Lugo is a member of the Palmetto Bay Youth Task Force.
“It gives me the opportunity to work with the Palmetto Bay Mayor Karen Cunningham,” she says.
One of the youth task force’s main projects last year was the Buddy Bench project. The task force has also put together youth teen talks, including one about financial literacy.
“We’ve done a lot of environmental clean ups,” she says. “We did one at Deering Bay.”
At school, she’s a board member of the Smiles for All Club, a club that helps improve the lives of children residing at an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
“We have a yearly mission trip to the Dominican Republic,” she says.
She’s gone on three of the trips and plans to go again in January.
At school she’s a member of the National Honor Society, the National Business Honor Society, the National Science Honor Society, and Mu Alpha Theta. Lugo is vice president of the Quill and Scroll International Journalism Honor Society.
“This honor society is new,” she says. “Every honor society has to do a project. We want to do a newspaper.”
Lugo is also an athlete, playing on the varsity lacrosse team.
In college she intends to major in Business Communication and Public Relations.
Her application list includes the University of Florida and Florida State University, the University of Tennessee, Auburn and Clemson University.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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