CONNECTING Volunteer finds her place by creating it

LAUREN DENNIS Bosque School

N one of the service learning projects available to Lauren Dennis at Bosque School resonated with her. “The personal connection wasn’t there,” she says.

Two of her schoolmates agreed, so they found the Mayor’s Office of Volunteerism and Engagement, or MOVE, which matches volunteers to projects throughout the city.

They formed their own group, Youth MOVE, “our army of three,” she says. MOVE connected them with the Animal Humane Society, Habitat for Humanity and a ceremony for POWs at Kirtland Air Force Base.

“We had an opportunity to talk to the veterans and get some perspective that only comes when you get outside your personal bubble,” says Dennis, 18. “It made us feel more grounded in the community and allowed us to be part of the change we seek and that we can see with our own eyes.”

During her junior year, Dennis expanded Youth MOVE, getting dozens of other students involved; in her senior year the program drew from the entire student body and three new leaders were trained to take over from Dennis and the other founding members.

A keen environmentalist, Dennis testified in the state Legislature in support of a bill to fund the Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program, a data tracking of the bosque ecosystem.

Dennis, who is fluent in Spanish and tutors students in Latin, runs on her school’s cross country team and is a captain on the lacrosse team.

Dennis plans to focus on environmental studies and political science, with an eye toward a possible career as an environmental lawyer.

JIM THOMPSON/JOURNAL What Lauren Dennis calls “our army of three,” grew into YouthMOVE, a volunteer organization at Bosque School that works with the Albuquerque mayor’s MOVE program. Here, she is shown playing lacrosse at Bosque.