Riverhead student heads to Georgetown medical leadership program

Aileen Erazo’s path from Riverhead High School to Georgetown University was built in the gym, the garden and the dance team rooms of the Butterfly Effect Project. The junior, who has been with the East End nonprofit for nearly four years, was headed this summer to a 10-day National Youth Leadership Forum for Advanced Medicine and Healthcare, a step toward the pediatric career she has long wanted.

Erazo joined the Butterfly Effect Project as an eighth-grader while dealing with severe social anxiety, and the organization became a place where she felt welcomed and more confident. Over time, she took part in the group’s Garden Club, Nike Boot Camp and Butterfly Blitz dance team, eventually becoming a captain. That growth now carries into a program meant to give students direct exposure to medicine.

The Georgetown-based forum will put Erazo into hands-on activities that include learning how to suture, scrubbing in for surgery, stopping a bleed and visiting trauma centers in Maryland. Envision says the program also includes simulated fracture reductions, blood drawing, patient communication, symptom evaluation and care-planning, with exposure to cardiology, phlebotomy, trauma care and emergency medicine. Erazo has said she wants to become a doctor, specifically a pediatric doctor, because she likes working with children and caring for them.

Her opportunity also points to the support system behind it. The Butterfly Effect Project says it began on March 8, 2014 with eight girls from the Riverhead and Flanders communities and now serves more than 700 young people, girls and boys, across 31 chapters on the East End. The group says its Nike Boot Camp is a collaboration with the Riverhead Nike Outlet, and its school-liaison work focuses on creating safe and inclusive school communities and bridging the gap between school and home.

The nonprofit is also linked to the North Fork Side by Side charitable fund at the Long Island Community Foundation. Its new community garden project is tied to the Daniel & Henry P. Tuthill Farm in Riverhead, a site listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Envision says students must be at least 14 and in grades 9-12 during the 2025-26 school year, underscoring how Erazo’s Riverhead experience has become a concrete step toward higher education and a medical career.