The Pace Center for Girls Volusia-Flagler raised $119,590 at its annual “Believing in Girls” breakfast, held at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on Friday, May 16.
It’s the first time the event’s donations have reached six figures, and the community’s support is coming at a time of transformation for the Ormond Beach school as it moves ahead with constructing a new $6.2 million campus. During the breakfast, Executive Director Sheila Jordan announced that Pace had closed on land for the new 12,000-square-foot school, to be located at 410 Clyde Morris Blvd. in Ormond Beach.
The school, Jordan said, will allow the Pace Center to not just continue serving its current 52 students, but expand services to 85 girls as well as offer extension services to those who simply need counseling.
The work the Pace does, Jordan said, is about belief and possibilities for the girls.
“We’re helping them believe — believe that something can be different than it has been,” Jordan said. “And we watch a girl come from ‘I can’t,’ to ‘I think I can,’ to ‘I know I can,’ to ‘I am’ to ‘I did’ and that’s all because we encourage them to believe and to try and try and try again.”
‘I’ve discovered my voice’
Pace serves middle school and high school girls in Volusia and Flagler County. The girls often need help with academics, and are in need of counseling, social services or mental health resources. A day program, the girls are assigned a counselor and an academic advisor for support as they work toward graduation.
Every year, the breakfast event allows Pace girls to share their stories. This year was no exception.
One student read a poem and three others — all 16-year-olds who are graduating this year — spoke about how the school has helped them. For Jordan, Pace helped her with her depression and anxiety.
“Today, I can proudly say that I’m not the same person who I was when I first walked through those doors,” she said. “I’m more confident, more self aware and more hopeful. I’ve discovered my voice and I’ve learned that it matters.”
Gabby came to Pace when she was 13 years old. She said she had been “falling into the wrong crowd” and making choices that didn’t reflect who she was.
“I was lost, but then I found Pace, or maybe Pace found me,” she said. “This school didn’t just give me an education, it gave me a second chance. It gave me hope. It gave me the tools to believe in myself when I didn’t know how. The staff here saw potential in me, when I couldn’t see it for myself. They lifted me up, and day by day, helped me build a better me.”
The third girl to speak at the breakfast, Alexis, enrolled in Pace as a sophomore in September 2024. Before coming to Pace, she said she struggled with motivation and self-confidence, and school felt like a place of anxiety rather than growth. Pace changed that, she said.
“I am now able to walk into school with confidence,” she said. “I feel comfortable participating, learning and growing, not just academically, but emotionally and personally. Pace has not only helped me reclaim my education, but it’s also helped me believe in myself for that I will always be grateful.”
It is most rewarding to see the girls’ transformations, said Pace Center teacher Charlene Daniels-McDuffie, who has worked for the nonprofit since 2014. Being part of the team, she said, has allowed her to witness the students’ growth, many of whom have gone on to work in careers in medicine, law, education, counseling, therapy and science.
“Now, please note that the girls would sometimes start out in the program, reluctant, ambivalent, and even resistant to our support, but that’s because our genuine care, love and consideration sometimes was foreign to some of them,” Daniels Mc-Duffie said.
From Pace to PhD
Before Sajan Green came to Pace in 2015, she was struggling with depression, anxiety and self-harm. At 13, she was smoking and doing drugs, and she and her mom became homeless after her mom’s boyfriend was murdered in their home.
Green dropped out of school. She spent every day smoking marijuana.
Then at 15, she gave school another go, but dropped out once again. She and mother lived in a home with other drug addicts, and Green said it was then that she realized she needed to make a change.
That’s when she found Pace.
“I vividly remembered the day that I got the call,” Green said. “‘I got in.’ I remember this day so sweetly, because it was the first time that I felt hope in years. But Pace gave me more than hope. Pace gave me a solid foundation of support that I will continue to build upon for years.”
Green only spent nine months at Pace, but she said the program’s impact “will last a lifetime.”
Now, 10 years later, Green is a third-year doctorate student at the University of Florida, studying chemical biology and working at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Sciences in St. Augustine, where she looks for new medicines like antibiotics and cancer treatments derived from natural sources.
“If you had met me 10 years ago and you had seen the teenager that I was, you wouldn’t have looked at me and said I could become a PhD level scientist looking for new drugs to help people, except the people at Pace did,” Green said. “They didn’t see my circumstance. They didn’t see my sometimes bad attitude, and they didn’t see who I statistically should have become. They saw who I could be and they nurtured and supported that girl, and that’s the beauty of Pace. They see a girl for who she can be, and they incessantly fight to get her to see it too.”
Imagine the possibilities
At last year’s breakfast, Jordan said she asked attendees to close their eyes and believe. She asked them to remember Pace’s dedication to providing girls with support, guidance and opportunities, and see the day-to-day transformation in the students.
Then, she asked them to imagine doing it in a 100-year-old building — one with spotty internet, and one where a hurricane displaced them all to a facility with no walls and one bathroom stall.
Pace is currently located at 208 Central Ave. in Ormond Beach in the former Rigby Elementary school building, which used to be the city’s school for Black students. After Hurricane Ian damaged the school’s roof in 2022, students and staff relocated to the gymnasium at Nova Community Center for eight months.
“And I said, ‘Imagine with me the possibilities of a new place, and in less than a year, we have land for a new place,'” Jordan said. “You believed with us.”
The breakfast was attended by community leaders, elected officials and both the superintendents of Volusia and Flagler Schools.
Volusia County Schools Superintendent Carmen Balgobin congratulated Pace on their work. Speaking directly to the Pace girls, Balgobin said they have a community that believes in them.
“I had a conversation with some of you this morning, and you have great aspirations, and I have no doubt in my mind that every single one of you will excel in those dreams that you have for yourself,” Balgobin said. “And always remember as community members, that when we’re behind our girls and we’re supporting our girls, we will always have a successful community, because you are the bedrock of this community.”
Next year, Pace will be celebrating a major milestone: its 30th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the organization will be hosting an anniversary gala.
“Please continue to believe with us, continue to invest in us, continue to visit us and just stay along the journey,” Jordan said. “It’s going to be incredibly exciting.”
