Audrey Gold Singer, an eighth grader at Isidore Newman School, founded the Green Team, a club focused on reducing, reusing and recycling in the Newman community.
Lisa Swenson, a sixth grade science teacher at Newman, initially inspired Singer to get involved with the community with the Green Team. Singer was given documentaries to watch, projects to get involved in and foundations to support with her activism.
Since the club was started, the group has focused on environmental and community service both in and around the school. The club built dog waste stations around campus, collected old tennis shoes to be remade into turf for fields, collected greeting cards to be re-used and sold for St. Jude’s hospital fundraising efforts and more.
Outside of school, Singer has always been involved with Charley’s Fund, a favorite cause of her mother’s. Singer always sent money to the foundation whenever she had a bake sale, but this past year the foundation was petitioning to get Accelerated Approval from the FDA for a drug that had proven to slow down the muscle decay in children with Duchene Muscular Dystrophy.
The petition needed 100,000 signatures by a certain deadline. Singer presented Charley’s Fund and the petition to Newman and asked students and teachers to sign the petition and share it with their friends and family. “I provided them with all the information they needed, and within a few minutes, there were students signing and following the petition,” says Singer. “One of my friends texted me in the final countdown because she was so excited to see them reach 100,000.”
For Singer’s Bat Mitzvah project, she decided to focus on breast cancer by volunteering with the Jewish foundation Shareset. Shareset aids diagnosed women and their families in sorting out their plans and preparing them for their treatment. Singer has also participated in Susan G. Komen’s Race for the cure.
In addition, she has volunteered with the New Orleans’ Women’s Shelter Community Service Day with Newman. The project was to set up a pot-painting station for the kids at the shelter to enjoy.
“At first, I wasn’t sure if they were going to like painting pots, but seeing their faces as they ran towards the table excited me and made me want to help even more. I felt so privileged to be there and give the kids something to be happy and feel good about,” she says.
Singer has ambitious plans for her future: she wants to study to be a doctor in particular to help cure leukemia patients. Later on in her life, she wants to open a bakery and then have a third career as a math teacher at Newman.
