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Miami Palmetto High junior Sydney Hochstadt’s community service usually involves kids.
She’s done many things, but since January, her love of helping children and her friends has taken a novel turn.
Hochstadt is helping her friend Erika Diaz coach a group of 11-year old boys in a YMCA basketball league. The teens are co-coaches. The team is undefeated so far.
“Everyone doubts our abilities because we are 16-year girls,” she says with a laugh. “It is pretty unusual.”
While Hochstadt hasn’t played basketball since elementary school, she did observe her father and her brother coach in other basketball leagues, so she knows the ropes.
In addition to coaching basketball, every other Saturday since September she has been going to Caribbean K-8 Center to work with children at Achieve Miami, a program to help kids reach higher levels of literacy.
The teens who go are chosen by one or two Little Buddies who want to work with them.
“First they read to us,” she says. “We read for an hour and then they write about it.”
Then they go to the playground and play.
“It’s really fun, they are all super different and adorable,” she says.
Hochstadt also volunteers at Friendship Circle, the program for special needs individuals. She goes every other Sunday.
“I have a buddy,” she says. “I play with her and do activities.”
She initially started in ninth grade but COVID closures forced a hiatus. She started again when the program reopened. She not only attends the Sunday sessions, she also volunteers for the Winter Camps, going on field trips with the campers to places like ZooMiami.
For two summers, Hochstadt was a camp counselor at Bet Shira.
“I really liked it. They were really cute two and three-year-olds.”
As a counselor she says she learned about her strengths and weaknesses.
As a child, her heart broke whenever she saw a homeless person. In ninth grade, she and her dad decided to act. For three months they made sandwiches and put them in bags with water or milk, then they drove around areas likely to be populated by the homeless to give out the food bags.
This summer, Hochstadt plans to go to Costa Rica for a service trip where they will build a community center, teach children English and make food for everyone.
At school, she is vice president of Palmetto’s chapter of Amnesty International, a human rights organization.
“We meet once a month and we have activities every three weeks,” she says.
Club members will set up a table with materials and have fellow students sign petitions or write letters about issues involving human rights.
She’s a member of the English Honor Society, Psi Alpha, the Chinese Honor Society, the Philosophy Club, Key Club, and the Palmetto Animal Welfare Society (PAWS).
In honor of a beloved Palmetto alumni, who passed away last year in a car accident in Gainesville, Hochstadt has applied to be a counselor at Camp Jennie, the Memorial Day Weekend camp attended by underprivileged children in Atlanta. Attending the camp is a reward for the students for doing well in school.
Since it’s the second half of her junior year, Hochstadt’s attention is turning toward college and majors. She’s interested in architecture, psychiatry and psychology.
Her preliminary list includes UCLA, USC, and North Carolina at Chapel Hill and NYU.
Hochstadt continues to do what she can for the community but now in different ways.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
