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Palmer Trinity School junior Veronica Segredo started her own community service project this past year. Her first project last August was to conduct a supply drive with the supplies going to Miami Southridge Senior High School.
“We collected items like pencils, pens, paper, notebooks, all the necessities,” she says. “We emailed them and asked what they wanted. We did it through an Amazon wish list. We sent them (the items) to my house. I did it with my two best friends.”
In all, the girls collected 118 boxes of bulk supplies.
“We are hoping to expand it and do better and make a club out of it,” Segredo says.
This is not the first time she had participated in a collection drive for Southridge. Her sister had also done collections before moving on to college. The donations came mostly through family and friends and word of mouth.
“This year we are hoping to recruit more people so we can have more connections,” she says.
Segredo’s community service includes volunteering with Achieve Miami. She started in tenth grade, initially going to Goulds Elementary School.
“I fell in love with it,” she says. “I volunteered almost every Saturday. I did the summer program for two weeks.”
After the summer session, she switched from Goulds to the program at Caribbean K-8 Center.
“I’ve recruited a bunch of my friends. It’s such a good program. They started a new program called Special Projects, where volunteers can bring in a project. So, students have done coding programs or chess.”
Segredo decided to introduce a program for meditation and yoga. She plans to do rudimentary yoga poses and breathing exercises and plans to teach the program this summer.
“I am excited to bring this program to the kids,” she says. “It’s emphasizing giving your body a rest.”
This summer, she’ll also attend the National Student Leadership Conference at Duke University in July for nine days. There she’ll learn about psychology and neuroscience.
“That’s what I want to major in in college,” she says.
At Palmer Trinity, she is the co-lead for the Student Ambassador Program.
“Your job is to do tours for any families interested in going to Palmer Trinity, or if they applied are weighing which school to go to,” she says. “I love doing these tours. I could talk about Palmer (Trinity) all day long.”
She’s also a member of the Love for Lotus Club, Mu Alpha Theta, the Spanish National Honor Society, and the Science National Honor Society.
Last year, for the Science National Honor Society, she participated in the Orchid Project for the Fairchild Challenge. The goal was to increase the number of orchids of a specific species that’s going extinct.
They planted the orchids on trees where they could flourish. They watered them every week. At the end, they sent in the results.
“The purpose to make it aware to people the problem of how the native species are going extinct,” she says. “How it will pollinate and how orchids will grow.”
Outside of school, she loves participating in 5K runs.
“They are such good causes,” she says.
She’s participated in the Miles for Melanoma, held at Zoo Miami. She also runs the 5K at St. Thomas Episcopal which raises money for Breakthrough Miami.
She plays lacrosse for Palmer and became team captain in tenth grade. This year she joined a club team, Miami Thunder.
For college, she’s visited Duke, Vanderbilt, the University of Florida, Boston College, and Northeastern. She wants to major in psychology and neuroscience to become a child psychologist.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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