My name is Genoveva Gallegos. I am from Tucumcari, New Mexico. I am a senior at Pecos Cyber Academy, and this is my 4th year with Evolvement, but this is my second year on the leadership team. Throughout the leadership team I have met people from around the state and even made some new friends. When I joined the leadership team I was really shy and afraid of public speaking.
Slowly with the help of amazing opportunities through Evolvement, I learned how to come out of my shell and become more confident in public speaking. I have even done things I never thought someone my age could do. I have met with state legislators, American Heart Association advocates and members, and even got to meet with congress members all before I graduated high school. These are things I was afraid to do, however with proper training and practice sessions I was able to overcome that fear and meet with them. From my point of view, it was completely mind blowing but still a great experience to do.
When I first joined the Evolvement team, I had heard about it from an older student who was doing an event at my middle school. I was inspired by this student and once I became a freshman in high school, I was ready to be part of the team and take charge. Since then I was really happy to be able to take part in making my community and state a better and healthier place to live. In my junior year, which was during the year 2020, I applied to be part of the leadership team. I was kind of scared to apply my sophomore year, but decided to go all out and apply during my junior year. I was excited to receive the results. I saw the email in my inbox and felt kind of nervous to open it. When I did open the email I jumped up and down with excitement and cried happy tears finding out I had been accepted to join the leadership team. However, because of the pandemic that hit, unfortunately I wasn’t able to join the Summit in person. So, we held a virtual summit session, but I still had a blast getting to know all the other members and making new friends. We did activities from arts and crafts to team games. The more events and meetings we had with members of the team the more we bonded.
Evolvement as a whole is like a family. Everyone gets along, hangs out, and cares for one another. That’s something we rarely see today. Through encouragement and much practice I learned how to become more confident in public speaking and learned how to come out of my shell and become less shy. This is something I learned through my experience with Evolvement. I would go back and do it all again if I could.
In all honesty, I will miss everyone who I have gotten to know and gotten to hang out with a lot. However, I know once me and my fellow seniors within Evolvement go on to follow our future paths we know that there will be some great Evolvers and that the mission is far from over. Overall, I would say if there’s a great opportunity in your grasp, reach out and take it. Lastly, I would like to thank everyone for reading and a massive thank you to all my friends and team leaders for helping me along throughout this amazing journey and experience to help make New Mexico a better and safer place to live and helping our schools stay tobacco free 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
