TAMPA - While WFTS-Ch. 28 reporters buzz around the community chronicling the day's most eye-catching stories, veteran journalist Lissette Campos takes a decidedly different approach.
"When my colleagues in the newsroom are covering crooked politicians, embezzlers, or crazy people doing something wrong, I get the happy stuff," said Campos, the director of community affairs.
Campos' career achievements include a number of serious-news assignments, but as host of WFTS' Positively Tampa Bay, it's the role she's played helping her viewers connect to the community that led the Girl Scouts of West Central Florida to choose her as one of its 2018 Women of Distinction.
The nonprofit celebrated six honorees - Campos, Carlton Fields attorney Fentrice Driskell, M/I Homes executive Chloe Firebaugh, Northern Trust regional president Stephanie Goforth, former Pinellas County Commissioner Sallie Parks and retired professor Liana Fox - earlier this month at a luncheon at the Hilton Downtown Tampa.
Campos includes six Emmys, interviews with the Clintons and the Dali Lama and reporting from Ground Zero a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks among her achievements.
Her proudest accomplishment, however, revolves around the effort she's led at WFTS to raise awareness of domestic abuse. The station's "Taking Action Against Domestic Violence" campaign has earned more than a dozen journalism awards since its 2008 launch and resulted in a 77 percent increase in calls to the Florida Domestic Violence Hotline.
"It's the most satisfying, the most joyful experience that I've had in my entire career," said Campos, 50. "When I realized that it's truly everywhere, it stopped being an assignment and started being something I looked forward to doing, because I could help people."
Helping others also stands as a central theme in the life of Driskell who was honored as the 2018 Woman of Promise, a distinction reserved for honorees under 40. Driskell made a mark early when she became the first black woman president of Harvard University's Student Association. She's also serves as president of the George Edgecomb Bar Association and has held positions on Florida Bar committees about diversity and gender bias.
"It takes a community to help support you, to help show you the way, to give you that encouragement sometimes when things get hard, and for that reason I know that I have to give back to the community that gave so much to me," said Driskell, 39.
Driskell said that she comes from a close-knit, hard-working family, including three sisters, loving grandparents, a schoolteacher mother and father who drove trucks for Publix.
"It really starts with a good village, and radiates out to the people I met along the way - guidance counselors, teachers who took an interest in me and pushed me to expand my horizons," she said.
Driskell grew up wanting to become an engineer, but a high school government class and its dedicated teacher helped her realize at only 17 that she wanted to become a lawyer and run for office someday.
Now she's doing just that, challenging incumbent Shawn Harrison, R-Tampa, in the State House, District 63 race.
Both women had advice for girls who dream of similarly successful careers that seemed rooted in personal experience.
"The younger generation is being victimized by technology, all of this Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, where you can apply a filter to a photo or edit your posts," Campos said. "In life, you don't get the filter, you don't get to do it over. So when you approach life without fear of failure, that's when you can be your best self."
Driskell urged overcoming the tendency women have to count themselves out before even asking for what they want, citing advice she said came from her younger sister.
"Make them tell you no," she said. "You have to be willing to raise your hand and demand what you want, and you have to be willing to take risks and seize opportunities when they come to you. The worst they can tell you is no."
Contact Libby Baldwin at lbaldwin@tampabay.com. Follow her at @LibBaldwin
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