Rebuild Yourself Inc. returns to the Osceola County Veterans Library this September, empowering teens ages 12\u201318 to conquer the new school year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never wanted a child not to feel like they belonged,\u201d said Founder Cynthia Borgwing.<\/p>\n
Borgwing said she launched Rebuild Yourself Inc to help her daughter, Karina, make friends and feel included.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, she would call me and say, \u2018I have no friends. I feel like a loser,\u2019 and so I started blocking off time every day during her lunch break just to talk to her on the phone,\u201d Borgwing said. \u201cShe called me one day crying, saying that a dean found her in the bathroom eating lunch by the toilet seat, and rather than that dean making her feel better about herself the dean basically said, \u2018What are you doing here? Get out!\u2019 And she was very heartbroken about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Borgwing said she ended up calling her husband and told him they needed to do something.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to find something for her so that she could interact again with these kids because at the time, Lake Nona High School had 4,000 kids,\u201d Borgwing said. \u201cHow could she not talk to someone? I looked around and there was nothing there. So, I said, \u2018I\u2019m gonna do it myself.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, a year after we had started, we were hitting the year of our gala. I wanted to do a gala because I believe about 83 percent of nonprofits fail in the first year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cynthia then shared a chilling story: when a bump appeared on Karina\u2019s leg three years ago, they got it treated at AdventHealth Orlando, and it was cancer.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe battled for three years and unfortunately passed away last September. So, it\u2019s been almost a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Borgwing said she offers the program at no cost to ensure financial barriers never prevent a child from participating, to find the purpose in everyone\u2019s life in some capacity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if the whole purpose of, while Karina\u2019s life was cut short, perhaps it was to be something bigger, and her legacy will live on through helping all these children,\u201d Borgwing said.<\/p>\n
Rebuild Yourself prides itself on providing teens and young adults with a safe, supportive community focused on connection, resilience, and hope\u2014ensuring no young person faces life\u2019s challenges alone, unnoticed, or without peer support.<\/p>\n
Borgwings said one obstacle she faces is funding.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone expects non-profit funding to always be around, and that\u2019s really our main obstacle. Finding the children isn\u2019t the issue\u2014they come,\u201d Borgwing said. \u201cBut providing that service to others is where you know you\u2019re making a real impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Borgwing said turnout ranges from 15 to 20 youth at Lake Nona to smaller library groups of five to eight. Whether they join due to homeschooling, mental health struggles, or just the appeal of games and free snacks, the kids keep coming back because of the meaningful impact and community they find.<\/p>\n
Borgwing makes financial literacy memorable through hands-on activities, like calculating local living expenses based on future career salaries and running a mock grocery challenge at Bravo Supermarket. By working with real cash budgets, kids quickly learn about the actual costs of rent, utilities, and daily necessities.<\/p>\n
Borgwing\u2019s organization will meet at the Veterans Memorial St. Cloud Library on Sept. 1 and at the Buenaventura Lakes Library on Sept. 14, with both sessions running from 3-5 p.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find that the peer group feels more open, especially if another child has a similar thing,\u201d Borgwing said. \u201cIn these smaller peer support groups, if someone says something that might not be entirely accurate, the group remains supportive and gives them the confidence to speak up\u2014hopefully carrying over into class.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said sometimes kids just want to be heard by other kids their age and feel like they\u2019re really being received.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy daughter obviously flourished from it, and after she passed away, I had a little bit of a hard time,\u201d Borgwing said. \u201cLike, \u2018Am I doing the right thing? Should I shut it down?\u2019 because Karina was the heart of the whole program.\u201d<\/p>\n
Borgwing said she only started this because of what her daughter went through, but whenever she catches herself second-guessing about what to do, she sees a Facebook post from a parent saying Rebuild saved or changed their child.<\/p>\n
She said the messages from other parents would just start flooding in.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoments like that made me realize I needed to keep listening and keep going,\u201d Borgwing said. \u201cWe\u2019re all about healing themselves on the inside and portraying kindness to the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n
Borgwing said their peer group sessions are based on the peers\u2019 recommendations. She said some of the previous sessions ranged from helping a peer handle the death of someone close to them and overcoming social anxieties. Down the line, she said she wants to be servicing all the counties in Central Florida, and then eventually, helping military bases.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in the Navy, and my husband was in the Army, so I think about how DOD families travel, and kids have to start all over again,\u201d Borgwing said. \u201cIt would be great if the Department of Defense offered these life-skills services in their Fleet and Family Support Centers, so these kids have resources to meet each other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rebuild Yourself Inc. returns to the Osceola County Veterans Library this September, empowering teens ages 12\u201318 to conquer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384302,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140],"class_list":["post-384301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}