Teen serves, leads around community
Olivia Cohen of Hollywood has lived her life committed to giving back.
Cohen, 17, enters her senior year of high school this upcoming year. Her commitment to giving back began in the third grade when she founded her own nonprofit called Giving & Living, which has raised more than $18,000 over the years for local hospitals and wishes for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Cohen has also been active in the Jewish community. At her synagogue, Temple Solel in Hollywood, she has given 100 hours to its youth group, in which she serves as vice president of programming, and has participated in its mitzvah days. She volunteered at Jewish Adoption and Family Care Options in Sunrise for its summer program last year.
Recently, Cohen was selected as a Bank of America student leader. As a result of this selection, she has participated in an eight-week paid internship this summer at YMCA of South Florida after traveling with more than 200 students from around the country to Washington, D.C., for a leadership summit.
Through this internship, Cohen has found similarities between the Jewish and YMCA communities.
“With Judaism, I’ve found that the Jewish community is so supportive and that it’s such a big part of my identity and who I am,” she said. “I’ve also found that same support with the YMCA as they have their community that really allows them to succeed as well, so this has really taught me how important it is to have others around you that support you and are there for you when you need them and even when you don’t.”
Cohen described her experience at the Bank of America’s leadership summit in Washington, where she met with members of Congress and learned about diversity, nonprofit work and building leadership skills, as an “amazing experience.”
“It was really cool to be in an environment with more than 200 other high schoolers who have aspirations and goals and are really developed leaders engaged in their own communities,” she said.
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin, Temple Solel’s senior rabbi, noted that the synagogue is proud of Cohen’s “great achievement.”
“Her work exemplifies the kind of values that we instill in our young people — altruism and tikkun olam, world repair.”
Chen Ben Shabat-Levi, the synagogue’s youth group coordinator, said, “Olivia is very much involved in the temple.… She is always willing to volunteer, lead and assist in the temple’s events and in social action activities.”
Asked if her involvement in the Jewish community influenced her to seek out this internship, Cohen responded, “I think I’ve always been inclined to help my community and I definitely think that the temples and Jewish organizations I’ve been a part of, as well as mitzvah days and mitzvah projects, have always kind of pushed me even more towards that.”
“But with this internship itself, I think it was my affection and my drive to want to work in non-profits and I wanted to learn more about that and kind of have some of that firsthand experience before I determine it as my career,” she continued.