When Capri Mills was in middle school, she would visit the Animal Welfare Association in Voorhees every weekend. Finally eligible to volunteer on her 12th birthday, she was at the shelter that day to get started.
Now a Shawnee High School senior on her way to Bucknell University on a Presidential Fellowship/scholarship to study neuroscience, Mills has earned the 2022 Volunteer Service Award for volunteer efforts that have reached multiple organizations in South Jersey and even Philadelphia.
The award came at the May 11 Lenape district board of education meeting, where three other students were also honored for volunteerism: seniors Lina Neilson of Lenape High School, Nicholas Ori of Cherokee and Meredith Waropay of Seneca.
Mills constructed a library last fall for the Veterans Nursing Home in Philadelphia with help from the South Jersey community and delivered books for it in a box truck on Veterans Day.
“We also donated the books to refugees from Afghanistan and some local nursing homes,” Mills noted in a video shown at the board.
Mills also built a library for Strawberry Mansion, an inner-city school program in Philadelphia that had none; collected 5,000 books; and donated them to One Bright Ray Community, an accelerated high school in Philadelphia that used Mills’ books to create a lending library. She also authored a book last year: “Shore Blood” is a paranormal thriller set in North Wildwood.
For the volunteer service award, Mills was nominated by her AP Language Arts teacher Davon Loeb, who highlighted Mills’ efforts in the meeting video and noted the reason he was interested in her volunteerism was her work in donating books to those in need.
“I think that Capri embodies volunteerism, not just from what she has done in the classroom and in the Medford and Medford Lakes community, but what she has done outside of our communities,” Loeb said.
Mills recently donated coloring books and crayons to the Eleanor Corbett House for families and single women in Glassboro. She also has volunteered at Happy Hooves Stables and Forgotten Angels Equine Rescue, a Medford nonprofit that rescues horses from slaughter.
Mills noted that winning the volunteer service award and being recognized by the Lenape board, her teacher and Shawnee Principal Matthew Campbell was special, but Mills is not done devoting time to others with plans to continue volunteering in college.
“One of my goals in life is to do anything I can even to leave the world a little tiny bit better than I found it,” she offered, “and I hope that my volunteer efforts do that.”
For more information on the 2022 Volunteer Service Awards, visit lrhsd.rg
