Last month, Danica Cuddeford, a Grade 12 student of Niverville Collegiate Institute (NCI), was one of six graduating students in rural Manitoba to be nominated for The Prairie Award of Promise at the YMCA-YWCA Women of Distinction Awards. This award, which comes with an MPI-sponsored $2,000 scholarship for post-secondary studies, recognizes young women between the ages of 18 and 29 who show leadership and maturity and serve as role models for their peers.
Cuddeford has accomplished this in her school, her community, and beyond. Her scholastic achievement (a 96 percent average) has included service as Vice President of the NCI Student Council, hours spent as a volunteer tutor, and participation in the environmentalist group SWAG (Students Working Around the Globe) and the anti-tobacco club SWAT (Students Working Against Tobacco). In the community, she volunteers at a personal care home and has been a Sunday school teacher and childcare worker. In April 2015, Cuddeford was on the senior cheer team that won their division in the Sea to Sky international cheerleading competition.
Cuddeford credits her parents’ belief in her as a major source of motivation.
“I’ve always had pretty high expectations of myself,” she adds, “because everything in me wants to be my best as a role model for my younger sisters.”
She provides before-and after-school care of siblings and holds down a part-time job at Subway. Cuddeford also has a major interest in the plight of the homeless and participates in the Real World Homeless Situation project.
Before the end of the school year, she intends to recruit and organize another core group of students to serve as volunteers at the personal care home.
“My teacher, Miss Cadgia, nominated me and I feel so blessed and honoured that she would do that for me,” Cuddeford says. “I just had to give her a big hug!”
The presentation of the award will be made on May 4. If Cuddeford wins, the scholarship will go toward her studies at the University of Manitoba this fall.
