Teenager Shares Big Dreams Packed In Small Boxes

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) Seventeen-year-old Patricia Manubay has a dream.

"My dream that I kind of established when I was 12 was that I wanted to change the world," she said with a smile.

You could say she dreams big, and this may be why:

"I was bullied a lot in middle school and elementary school," she remembered. "I didn't really have the group of friends that would encourage me to get involved in different things, so I wanted to change that."

Changing it turned out to be just the beginning for the now college freshman.

"I've never seen a student with this kind of drive," said Derek Padilla, Manubay's teacher and advisor at El Camino High School in South San Francisco. "Now when she sets foot on campus since she talks to SIA, she's almost like a mini-celebrity because they want to be part of this magic."

S.I.A. is "Students in Action," a leadership programed developed through the Jefferson Awards Foundation and the accounting firm Deloitte. For two years, Manubay was the S.I.A. president at El Camino.

Her signature project "Dream Boxes" was born a bit under pressure.

"The night before the service projects were due I said to myself 'might as well turn one in,'" she said. "The night before, like 11pm, I still didn't finish my homework!"

On an assembly line, Manubay and her volunteers fill boxes with donated school supplies. Dream Boxes have gone to St. Jude's Hospital, foster care homes, and schools and families around the Bay Area. She's even hand delivered boxes to students in a small village school in the Philippines.

In addition to the regular school supplies of notebooks, glue sticks, and pencils, every Dream Box comes with something extra special in it: letters.

"It is a letter from another student that you don't know at all and they're telling you all these amazing things saying, 'You can do it! I support you! Even though we have never really even met.' And I think that is where the true power of Dream Boxes comes from," Manubay explained.

Her goal is to distribute 100,000 Dream Boxes by the end of 2015, and as of fall, she's about halfway there.

So for inspiring children to dream big like she does, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Patricia Manubay.