Last year the Lions Club sponsored a student essay contest. Linda Bui was one of three winners. She won $250 from the Lions and the Lions unleashed a tiger.

Linda has always had a strong social conscience so when she heard about the Leo Club, a student Lions Club, she was immediately interested. Like most adults, Linda says the vast majority of today's students have a strong social conscience. All they need is an opportunity to take action. Usually that requires someone else to have the vision and create the structured opportunity.

Linda started by approaching a few of her closest friends and inviting them to get involved. Eventually close to ten people showed interest but only a few would turn out to the lunch hour meetings she held to initiate the club. However, once the club started to take action, the membership doubled to twenty interested and active participants.

One of the first activities the club sponsored was a monthly social event for international students. Bowling and skating parties were among the most popular events but interest among the general student body really soared when Linda suggested organizing a penny drive with proceeds going to charity.

The club decided they would support Willow House, an organization that helps prostitutes get off the street, Haven House for abused women and children, and their own Dover Bay Skills For Life class.

Given that vision, twenty or more students dug in and began to organize the event. In the end it took these twenty students plus ninety or more other students to roll the 190,000 pennies collected -- $1,900 worth of pennies to be distributed to Haven House, Willow House and the Skills For Life program.

Actually the final total was $1,800 net as $100 was spent on incentive prizes. The classes that raised the most money won ice cream for everyone. "It's cheaper than pizza," Linda told me. The runners up got Popsicles.

With the penny drive over, the club is now looking for other projects. Two of the ideas they have are to sponsor a child overseas and to collect eyeglasses for third world countries

Right now the Leo Club is active only at Dover Bay Secondary School but Linda is looking to expand it to include all of the local high schools in Nanaimo. Meetings will be held at the Lions Complex on Bowen Road.

As regular readers of this column know, for the next few months we will be focusing on teenage Neighbourhood Heroes. Kristin Melstead and Kim Benson are two others.

Kristin and Kim are in Laura Harrison's Peer Leadership class at Dover Bay. For one of their projects they chose to raise money for Haven House and the Salvation Army.

Working on their own they organized a bottle drive in their neighbourhood - in fact they did two -- as well as one with their classmates. They also organized a walk-a-thon. In total they raised $500. $350 went to Haven House and $150 to the Salvation Army.

"It's been so worth it," they told me. "It's made both of feel so good."

Today's teenagers are pretty terrific aren't they? Too bad we hear so much about the not so good ones and so little about students like today's Neighbourhood Heroes.