‘I just naturally find that drive to help people’

Name: Branden Kerr

Age: 17

School: Watkins Mill High School

Accomplishment: Certificate of Excellence for the Prudential Spirit of Community Service Award; the President's Volunteer Service Award (for the second year in a row); and certified as an EMT, requiring 200 hours of classroom time and 250 hours in ambulance ride-alongs.

Key to Awesomeness: An innate sense of giving

Student Service Learning... The mere mention makes many a Montgomery County teen cringe and moan.

But for Watkins Mill senior Branden Kerr, the school system’s community service requirement has been an opportunity, not a chore—and one that he’s been making the most of.

MCPS requires 75 hours. Branden is at 1,358 and counting. And yet he still found time to be captain of Watkins Mill’s golf team and president for four years of Watkins Mill’s chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

It all started back in 5th grade when he volunteered at Montgomery Village’s former YMCA, helping out with weekend carwashes and the like. A couple years later, Tiger Woods brought the AT&T golf tournament to town, and Branden logged 40 volunteer hours in a single weekend.

Things sort of snowballed from there.

Roughly 100 hours came through his youth group at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, including trips to an orphanage in El Salvador and to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Still more hours came as an intern at the Montgomery County Police Department’s 1st District station in Seven Locks. And nearly a third of his total has come since August volunteering at the Gaithersburg-Washington Grove Fire Station as a member of the Junior Fire Brigade.

"Even if I didn’t get the hours, I’d still do it," he said. "Once I started, I didn’t feel like stopping. I figured, hey, if it’s this much fun getting hours, why would I stop?"

Each of those hours is time he knows he’s lucky to have.

Born more than two months premature and weighing barely two pounds, doctors gave him less than a 10 percent chance to live. Even if he did, they were nearly certain he’d suffer some kind of handicap or debility.

"I wasn’t expected to survive," he said. "I praise God for this. That’s how I really became a strong Christian. That’s what keeps me strong in the word. When life throws you curves, if you go back to your roots, you always find where you came from."

Whether to his uncles, cousins, father or grandfather, those roots inevitably lead to someone who has made it their life’s work to help others in need.

His father is a retired Army sergeant who served in Iraq. His uncle is a police officer in Chicago. A cousin is in the Coast Guard. And his grandfather was a 40-year firefighter in Pennsylvania.

He plans to follow in those footsteps and become a Montgomery County police officer while also serving as a volunteer firefighter. Eventually, he hopes the FBI to be in his future.

He’ll pursue his calling through Montgomery College’s Emergency Management program—with heaping doses of volunteering along the way, of course.

"I like to make change," he said. "I just naturally find that drive to help people."