Boys & Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania held its annual Youth of the Year competition, the regional level of the national Boys & Girls Clubs of America award contest, and named their finalist – Quaker Valley High School junior Paige Frank.

Youth of the Year is the signature effort of Boys & Girls Clubs from the local to national level, to foster a new generation of leaders fully prepared to live and lead in a diverse, global and integrated world economy.

Frank, 16, has been involved with BGCWPA programs since the summer before her freshman year of high school when she started attending the PPG Artificial Intelligence Pathways Institute summer camp, part of BGCWPA’s STEM programming. She recently co-led an app design team to win the local CGI I.T. Girl Challenge last May by creating an app that made it possible for students to connect with one another for academic support during the pandemic and beyond.

“We are proud of Paige for her brilliance and for putting that brilliance to work in a way that both builds her skills and benefits others,” said BGCWPA president & CEO Lisa Abel-Palmieri. “At BGCWPA, we invite youth into the adventure of learning so they can dream big and work toward their goals with guidance from supportive adults and innovative programs. Paige is a great example of that and she will make an excellent representative for BGCWPA as she moves to the state level of the competition.”

Frank hopes to attend Carnegie Mellon University to pursue a degree in computer science. STEM fields have been historically underrepresented by women, and she has plans to launch a nonprofit entity called Girls Closing the Gap. Her vision is a program similar to Girl Scouts but with a STEM focus. Frank wants to support and encourage girls to design and sell useful apps instead of cookies to fund their participation in computer science and robotics competitions, for example.

“My overarching goal for this entity is to encourage the next generation of women to pursue a career in any area of STEM,” Frank said. “I want to primarily focus on younger girls to give them a vision of who they can be.”

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