New year Family events, parties planned to help usher in 2014. PAGE 13 Coastal Living New program puts renovation work into mortgage. PAGE 21 Shima student Nanaimo’s karate kid wins at world championships. PAGE 11
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Baker turns adversity into positive action I t was early 2011 and something awful was happening to Nanaimo teenager Kennedy Baker. “I was crying all the time, but I didn’t necessarily know why,” Baker said. “I would come home from school and I would cry.” By February of 2011, Baker, who was attending Dover Bay Secondary School, weighed 90 pounds and was admitted to B.C. Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, where she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and an anxiety disorder. The chain of events that would trigger Baker’s stress and anxiety began in 2010 when her mother was sexually assaulted. Shortly after the incident, doctors discovered two lumps in both of Baker’s breasts and underwent surgery to remove them – thankfully, the lumps were not cancerous. In the weeks following the surgery, Baker was out for a routine jog near her home in Nanaimo when a man wearing a Halloween mask drove by and shot her, nicking her foot. It wasn’t long after her near-death experience when Baker learned that her estranged father had You get to died after a battle with alcoholmake yourself ism. But Baker rose above the be who you adversity. She got involved in various clubs and councils in want to be. school, such as the Me to We club, where she helped raise $11,000 for the construction of a new school in India. “You get to make yourself be who you want to be,” she said. “You don’t have to let other people make you be anything you don’t want to.” In 2012, Baker began volunteering at the Nanaimo 7-10 Club Society. It was during her time with the club that she yearned to do more for the community. “I was working in a soup kitchen and I noticed a lot of people going through the kitchen were having a lot of similar problems that I was dealing with, but I had a really supportive family and I was able to get the help, whereas they just weren’t able to get the help they needed,” Baker said. She formed her own organization called, STAND (Strength, Togetherness, Action, Non-Judgemental and Determination), which strives to eliminate poverty and promote mental health awareness. “Hopefully by sharing my story I’ll help people and get more people to share their story and in turn help even more people,” she said. ◆ See ‘CHARITY’ /4
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