AMANDA FELDMAN

Amanda Feldman has been making a positive difference in her school, community and the daily lives of others for years as she motivates her peers in volunteerism and community involvement. In 1997, Amanda founded “Peer Partners,” a youth volunteer group, to help others while inspiring her friends and community to share in the rewards of volunteerism. Amanda brings the community together as she advocates the prevention of youth smoking, illiteracy, homelessness, and birth defects, while supporting disaster relief efforts and inspiring kindness. Her efforts have reached across generations and continents.

In addition to her annual fundraising, she organizes community-based service projects that have mobilized hundreds of community members as they work together to meet the needs, health and well being of others in need. In addition to having been the annual top fundraiser in the effort to ameliorate illiteracy, she has collected toiletries for the homeless, hats for children with cancer undergoing chemotherapy, books for children who lost theirs during disaster, quarters for breast cancer research, handcrafted valentines to remind our veteran’s that they were loved by today’s youth, and more. She organized the first ever community talent show to raise money for the children of the victims of the September 11 tragedy and subsequently had more than 100 youth volunteer their talents.

Her latest volunteer effort culminated with a trip to a rural school in Ghana West Africa where she delivered sorely needed educational supplies and seed money to help build the school a library! She also serves as a Board Member to the American Red Cross Atlantic/Cumberland Chapter and Girl Scouts of South Jersey Pines advocating the needs of her peers and her community.

Amanda became a member of Atlantic County REBEL, a youth anti-smoking effort, at the age of 12. For the past four years, she has been REBEL Chairperson while serving on the State of New York Youth Advisory Board. In addition to delivering the anti-tobacco message to teens and community members throughout her county and state, she serves as mentor to middle school children as she leads, educates and motivates them to remain smoke free. She has written several articles for the “REBEL” magazine, which focuses on teen tobacco issues, and through her personal effort she took the anti-tobacco message to more than 800,000 teens Nationwide by publishing an article in Teen Newsweek.

She has also appeared on several infomercials, including WPIX’s anti-tobacco special “Kicking Ash” and CN8’s ‘One on One’ in an effort to mobilize her peers and community members toward a healthy smoke-free lifestyle. Her proposed ordinance to ban smoking in her local park for the health and safety of children and elders alike, resulted in her local City Council’s agreement to consider implementing a partial ban. She enlisted the support of Little League Presidents throughout the State of New Jersey, Those Little League Presidents have since either ordered or posted the ‘tobacco-free/smoke-free’ signs that Amanda designed, funded, and distributed, on their ball fields to send the message that tobacco affects the health and well being of our children. She is currently serving as Vice President of Development for IGNITE, the first ever national youth-led, youth-driven anti-tobacco movement. She has also recently been appointed to serve on the Youth Advisory Panel for The American Legacy Foundation.