To Andrew Christy, helping his community was never a “maybe.” Growing up in a military family taught him the value of service early on.
Christy moved to Niceville in middle school while his father was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, where he remained until graduating from Niceville High School in 2023.
“Growing up in the military, there’s this big idea of service, right?” Christy said. “I watch my dad doing all the stuff he does. … Because of that, I’ve always been really interested in service. In my time, mostly through high school, I did a lot of volunteering in the community.”
Christy’s volunteer work sparked a passion for humanitarian aid, and he’s currently in his fourth year studying international relations at the University of Florida, but plans to attend medical school next. He said seeing the needs of people in his own community inspired him to pursue medicine.
“My freshman summer after college, I came back to Niceville, and I was volunteering at Hope Medical Clinic in Destin, which was a medical clinic that offered free healthcare for uninsured people,” Christy said. “That’s really what sealed the deal for me, like me wanting to study medicine. … Niceville, Destin, it’s a very nice, affluent place. There’s so many people that kind of get brushed under the rug, and at that clinic I was able to see the impact that a few good doctors, nurses, and assistants can have.”
In 2025, Christy began working as a relief EMT for Okaloosa County to gain experience in the medical field. He often drove from Gainesville to Niceville on weekends to work shifts and help where he could.
“Not everything’s a crazy emergency like you see on TV, but for me, some of my most impactful experiences were just being able to be there for someone when they needed it most, and that’s 100% shaped what I want to do,” Christy said. “You know, I think that part of the way I grew up was like, helping wasn’t optional. If you had the ability to help someone, it was your responsibility, and that’s just kind of something I’ve taken with me.”
Christy’s service experience spans much farther than Okaloosa County, though. Currently, he’s in Barranquilla, Colombia, helping with disaster relief after earthquakes devastated much of Colombia and Venezuela, killing over 6,000 and leaving thousands more displaced or seriously injured.
“This semester I’ve been involved with an NGO that’s called Venezolanos in Barranquilla, which pretty much just translates to Venezuelans here in Barranquilla, where I’m living,” Christy said. “It’s an NGO that does a lot of stuff. It does integration. It helps with legal paperwork. They run a food kitchen in the parts of the city for vulnerable families. But more specifically, right now, in terms of the earthquakes, they’re running a lot of earthquake relief, humanitarian quarters, and stuff like that.”
Christy’s volunteer work helps bring food, supplies and other necessities to displaced families.
“A lot of my work here has been involved with raising money, packing aid boxes, collecting donations and loading trucks,” he said. “Venezuela, at this moment there’s still hundreds of thousands of people without homes, without proper shelter, without proper food, without proper access to anything. So the main thing has just been trying to get care to those people in such a dire situation, and it could be anything from — We sent boxes of salt, boxes of sugar, baby food. We even had toys for the kids.”
Seeing the gratitude from those affected by the disasters has only solidified Christy’s desire to pursue medicine and help out in his own community.
“For me, what is really impactful is, you see how far something that you consider so little can go. What I mean is … a bag of salt that costs 50 cents to buy and donate. To see and hear that somebody was able to, you know, use it to cook for a month, or they were able to feed their family … It was very astounding.”
Looking ahead, Christy knows he will bring the knowledge and experience he gained in Colombia back to Niceville.
“I mentioned how I volunteered at Hope Medical Clinic my freshman year,” he said. “Unfortunately, that clinic shut down because it lost an important grant, and it was one of the few free clinics in Okaloosa County, and one of the only clinics that had specialists. As I’m writing these medical school applications, I always see myself wanting to open the next Hope Clinic in [Okaloosa County], because the way I always think about it is, the clinic went away, but the patients didn’t. Every single patient that we saw, after the clinic closed, their needs stayed the same, if not got worse. And so I see myself coming back, and whatever specialty or whatever I choose in medical school will be with the purpose in mind of opening another free clinic.”
As he works toward this goal, Christy said he hopes his work will raise awareness about how even in Niceville, you can have an impact on somebody who may seem too far away to help.
“I think as a small town and as an affluent area, it’s easy to not think about what happens outside, and think it happens in some faraway land,” Christy said. “But, you know, to get here to Colombia from Orlando it was like, a four-hour flight. What I mean by that is four hours away, you have thousands and thousands of dead people and hundreds of thousands of injured and displaced people. I think it’s just important to keep that in mind.”
