• This year’s “Spirit of Community” awardee is a 13-year-old Hawaiian Rylee Brooke Kamahele.
• Rylee has been initiating projects to inspire other youth to be volunteers for change.
• Her projects involve donation drives for food, beach cleanups, entertaining kids at shelters, among others.

Aloha in Hawaiian means love, affection, compassion, peace, and mercy— all the attributes that one of their teens have, to be given the “Spirit of Community” award.

Thirteen-year-old Rylee Brooke Kamahele has always had a passion for volunteering and being of service for others.  She may have had to fight for her to get involved when she was still 8, but then on, she was allowed by organizations to volunteer for them.

Now she is being honored for her various programs and in inspiring and initiating activities that would allow the youth to be volunteers, too.

Rylee’s “Love Is A Verb” organization was involved in entertaining kids at shelters, beach cleanups, and Thanksgiving dinners for the homeless. This year’s Thanksgiving week, her team was responsible for distributing 320 turkeys to families. NFL running back Marshawn Lynch was with them in the project.

And for Christmas, Rylee organized donation drives and raised money for gifts and parties to be given to kids at the shelters.  These children received not just presents but felt the spirit of Christmas because of Rylee’s “Secret Santa Project”.

More than 300 kids from three shelters and one youth program got to enjoy a day of games, gifts, food, slush machines, and shaved-ice trucks.  What a treat!

Rylee has also been busy all throughout this pandemic and holiday season by distributing 2,500 boxes of food bi-weekly to families in need.

Her current project is to provide a nonverbal little boy who needs an iPad to communicate through a donation drive.  The amount raised would go to purchasing the iPad, the programs needed, and —raising money for the iPad, the programs he needs, and its protective case.

She is also involved in environmental awareness campaigns aside from these initiatives.  Her umbrella organization, “The Catalyst Club”, inspires the youth to be agents of change.

Volunteerism knows no age and Rylee Brooke is a fine example of that.  Her being named one of America’s Top Youth Volunteers by the 2020 Prudential Spirit of Community Awards, is well-deserved.

Source: Good News Network