Lauren Tyree volunteering in the Dominican Republic.
Lauren Tyree was inspired to volunteer by the impact her grandparents had on the 150 children they fostered in her father’s lifetime.
“Every time a child would come into their home, they would come in without a vision, without goals and without plans,” said Lauren, a St. Mark’s High School junior and resident of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. “They always left with visions, goals and plans – and ways to get there.”
Lauren, a Scout for five years and a Legionnaire in the American Legion Women’s Auxiliary, has earned a dozen awards for her work, and the latest is being named 2024 American Legion National Eagle Scout of the Year, which comes with a $10,000 college scholarship.
She has chronicled some of her efforts in “Remember Me,” a six-minute documentary that itself has amassed 20 awards. The title comes from a request by two girls she had been helping in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. “The girls were asking that I remember them,” she told KMET .
“Of all the things in the world that they could want – food, water, clothes, education, a fix to their leaky roof – what they wanted the most was to be remembered.”
Lauren has also used her video production skills to create numerous videos for St. Mark’s admissions, advancement and administration. She runs sound for school Masses and for the past three years has produced a nine-camera video broadcast of the Pike Creek school’s graduation ceremony.
The AV skills and equipment are from her father, Ty, who studied theatrical sound design in college. “I have a hobby of making videos and anything that makes an event louder or more exciting,” he said.
“She has also helped with programs like Girls on the Run, which is a confidence-building program involved with running, and she would DJ the 5K races that would psych up the kids,” he added.
Lauren also helped broadcast fundraisers for places like Sean’s House, a mental health safe haven in Newark.
Volunteering in so many ways
Lauren’s volunteering – more than 4,000 hours so far – has included starting three nonprofits, recruiting a team of over 150 volunteers and raising more than $300,000 for her organizations.
The first was Cul-De-Sac Concerts , in which bands played in cul-de-sacs for seven or eight socially distanced people and 30,000 people online. The nonprofit raised $50,000 for food banks during the pandemic.
She created the Growth & Leadership Development Network to save her Scout troop and a few others from losing their charters. The network is starting another troop in West Grove, Pennsylvania, and has received a land grant from Embreeville Township in Pennsylvania to build a Scout leadership camp.
The third is Students Engaged in Relief Volunteering , primarily involved in service trips to the Dominican Republic but also local efforts. “I have worked hard to make a difference in communities around the world,” she said of her nine or so service trips.
Her Scouting efforts include training hundreds of aspiring youth leaders, helping friends with their Eagle projects (hers was building a gaga pit at Avon Grove Charter and starting a fundraising dance) and running troop ski trips.
At St. Mark’s, Lauren is an honors student who played volleyball as a freshman and sophomore. She gave up the sport to devote more time to service trips but hopes to play tennis this spring. She is lead delegate in Model UN, vice president of International Service Trips in Students in Action, member of Treat Kids with Kindness and events volunteer for the Muscle Movement Foundation. She has conducted an interactive leadership seminar for St. Mark’s 50 most impactful student leaders, and she has won a National Gold Key Scholastic Writing award.
In college, she plans to major in psychology and public policy, hopefully leading to a career helping organizations manage their human experience and researching environmental impacts on people’s psyche.
She feels that there are three important messages in “Remember Me.”
“The first is that there’s a lot of need in a lot of different areas around the world.
“The second one is that that need can be filled fairly simply. When people come in to help, a little bit of service goes a really long way.
“And that third message is that happiness is a choice. … The people that we met in the Dominican Republic are so happy and so positive, despite their unfortunate and really difficult situation. That really helps my team and me … to really appreciate our blessings and be happy with what God’s given us.”
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