WESTON, Fla. – All this week, we are sharing stories of South Florida kids who are making a difference in our community. Their projects are creative, innovative and life-changing.
Hundreds of young people applied for Local 10's Summer of Service Award.
Nine-year-old Rachel Supnick is just as comfortable teaching a lesson about wildlife as she is caring from wild animals like Sophia the opossum.
Rachel's passion for nature and her desire to educate her classmates are the reasons she won our Summer of Service Award. It also got her a little party with her friends at Manatee Bay Elementary School.
"Nature is so beautiful, and I just love the outside world. Being inside, well, I don't really like it," Rachel said. "I think the outside is so much better."
Rachel thinks birds are the prettiest animals. She is the youngest and one of the most passionate volunteers at the Sawgrass Nature Center.
Her focus now is to save the American Kestral.
"I'm really concerned with the American Kestral," she said. "They are a threatened specifies and soon, if no one does anything, they could become endangered.
The $1,000 Rachel received for being a Summer of Service winner will pay for her class to have a field trip to the center and build their own American Kestral nesting boxes to be strategically placed around the county.
When you put out the nesting boxes, you want to put them up in January to February because that's when they breed. And when they go in, they will lay seven eggs.
Rachel is so special because she really takes an interest in what we do here, and she understands that raising funds is so critical for us to stay open and care for our patients," said the center's hospital Manager Donna Fife.
She's proof that you're never too young to make a difference.
For more information on the Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital, visit www.sawgrassnaturecenter.org, or find them Facebook.