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Miami Palmetto High School senior Valentina Nicolini has earned more than one thousand community service hours. She has done a variety of volunteer jobs, earned her Girl Scout Gold Award and chairs two youth advisory boards.
She chose her gold award project after working to pack bags for I SeeYou/Choose Love, a foundation that works on alleviating homelessness.
“I saw a genuine need for female sanitary supplies,” she says. “I saw a video. I saw how hard that was for homeless women.”
For her Gold Project, she created her own branch of the organization to address that need.
Nicolini also partnered businesses and local physicians to set up permanent donation drop boxes.
“I’ll pick them up from the locations and put them in bags, and drop them off at I See You,” she says.
On Mondays, she is a lead teacher for CodeArt at the Pinecrest Library. She was a teaching assistant in ninth and tenth grade.
“You code self-portraits and games, and abstract art,” she says. “Anything that has to do with art in general.”
She’s chairman of the Children’s Trust Youth Action Committee in South Miami-Dade.
“We have monthly meetings,” she says. “We have field trips. We do a lot of things for our community. The field trips tend to be to surrounding areas, helping the community.”
The YAC has yearly projects. They have planned to put in gardens at different schools.
“They were funded, and we bought the soil and the plants,” she says. “One girl provided wheelbarrows and shovels from her house. It was a lot of work, but we dug up and planted.”
Nicolini is also the chair of the Palmetto Bay Youth Board. As chair, she spearheaded the initiative to clean the Chinese Bridge. The board also participates in the Halloween Trunk or Treats, cancer runs, filling backpacks for underserved students as well as packing supplies for Ukraine.
At Palmetto, she is secretary of the Chess Club. Club members go to Southwood Middle to teach the middle schoolers how to play chess.
She’s also in the National Honor Society, the English National Honor Society, the Science National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta and vice president of the Italian Culture Club.
She speaks Italian at home and has taken Italian at Miami-Dade College for dual enrollment. She’s also taken Spanish for four years.
Nicolini is a member of the Health Information Project. She loves teaching the modules to freshmen students.
“I see that at times they do learn things from it,” she says.
Nicolini plays flute in the band, and she is again captain of the golf team. She also plays on the tennis team.
Along with her other skills, writing is a strong point. She’s won the Patriots Pen Essay Contest two years in a row. She also won the PTSA Leadership Award last year.
She was chosen as one of 30 girls in Miami to take part in the new University of Miami math program for girls.
“We take a college level math class on campus for 2.5 hours each week,” she says.
Nicolini traveled to New York for the Girls in Politics Initiative and was chosen for the Florida Girls State this year.
“We each had to propose a real bill,” she says.
Her bill advocated mandatory Everglades education in high school and an Everglades club in high schools.
She’s interning in the Palmetto Bay Mayor’s office, which is in line with her interest in a career in politics, government or law.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
To see more #Miaminews from #Aventura to #Coralgables to #SouthMiami, #Pinecrest, #Palmetto Bay and #Cutler Bay and all throughout #Miamidadecounty go to:
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