Wantagh Girl Scout raises money for Camp Kiwanis charity

Wantagh High School junior Faith Stallone has demonstrated that providing service to her community is not difficult if it’s done one step at a time.

Faith, a member of Wantagh’s Girl Scout Troop 3305, recently raised $1,070 to help send an underprivileged child to Camp Kiwanis, a summer camp in upstate New York that provides recreational and educational programs for children and adults with developmental disabilities. The camp is part of Kiwanis International, a global organization of volunteers who help improve children’s lives and communities through service and charity.

During a Sept. 3 meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Wantagh, Faith delivered the check to its club president, Margaret Silberger, who said Faith’s commitment to service completes a cycle of young volunteers helping other children in need.

“There’s nothing like kids helping kids for all the right reasons,” Silberger said.

Faith, a member of her high school’s Kiwanis Key Club, began to raise money for Camp Kiwanis in July, when she decided to promote a poster with information on Camp Kiwanis and a QR code to send donations. She promoted her poster at the Thursday Night Live events, a series of summer block parties on Railroad Avenue in Wantagh, hosted by Mulcahy’s Pub & Concert Hall. She also promoted her poster at her church, the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Levittown, during its summer food truck events.

“It was a really good experience,” Faith said, “because I got to feel that I was helping someone. And not even just helping one person, I was helping someone give back, because they might have such a good experience that they’re able to give that experience to someone else when they’re older.”

Sending a child to Camp Kiwanis is just one of many ways Faith has helped serve her community. For her project to earn the Gold Award, the highest honor a Girl Scout could achieve, Faith raised more than 700 pounds of food for Long Island Cares, created a youth food pantry at her church, and led a school-wide food drive to tackle local hunger. Her efforts educated the community and left a lasting impact.

She received her Gold Award certificate in June, and her troop leader, Kerri Stallone, who is also her mother, said Faith has become a role model for other students in her grade who are looking to find ways to perform community service.

“She’s sort of being like a leader to show them how easy it is,” Kerri said. “Just pick something and represent it in a strong way to let others know that you can care about it too.”

She added that she’s proud of her daughter’s accomplishments, which have shown her to be a true inspiration to the rest of the Girl Scout troop. According to Kerri, five girls in the troop have gone for their interviews to start their Gold Award projects.

“It really showed her leadership skills, “Kerri said of her daughter, “and now we got five more that are like, ‘Oh, I want to jump in on that.’”

Kerri said one of her Scouts is working on a program to help college girls who have nut allergies. Another is planning with her synagogue to raise money to help people in Israel. Kerri added that service projects could sometimes be overwhelming for Scouts because they think too big, but Kerri said she tells them to start small, which allows them to understand how attainable it can be.

“Just talking back and forth with them, it gets them sparked,” Kerri said.

She wants them to understand that giving back to communities doesn’t end after Girl Scouts, and that it can be a life-long passion.

“I’m hoping that what it’s going to do is spark them to join a community service-based sorority when they go to college,” Kerri said, “so that they understand that, me, as a 55-year-old woman, I’m still giving back.”

As for Faith, she continues to find other ways to help her community. In June, she joined the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, a nonprofit dedicated to investing in blood cancer research, where she will help raise money in a fundraising campaign from January to March. She is also working on a beauty pageant with older adults at Amber Court Assisted Living Communities in Westbury, where they will highlight talents they’re still good at, and questions based on what they enjoy.

According to Faith, the pageant’s goal is to help the older adults reflect on who they are now.

“We’re just focused on what they like to do and what they think they’re good at,” Faith said. “So, if one of them is good at singing or if one of them is good at telling jokes, we’re going to highlight that and we’re going to have a whole night for them to do that.”

Faith's dedication to service extends beyond her recent achievements. Her mother realizes that Faith's approach to overcoming challenges through helping others has become a source of inspiration.

"I’m very proud of her," Kerri said, "because there are things in life that make you feel defeated, and the way she combats feeling defeat is by coming up with ideas to help others. That’s her coping.”