There was a time when Elizabeth Banducci of Brampton wondered whether or not she'd be able to regain enough strength to swim at an elite level.

She was a competitive swimmer growing up, but as a 12-year-old, she had surgery to remove a benign tumour in her knee. Intensive therapy followed and while swimming helped in her recovery, she questioned whether or not she'd be able to swim at the same pace she could before surgery. That was until she met her swim coach, Miguel Vadillo.

"He has trained open-water swimmers and triathletes before and was telling me I should consider (open-water swimming)," said Banducci, now 16. "I didn't think It would be possible to swim that way again, but he was telling me about all these people who got in these lakes. I was so excited about the possibility of doing it.”

With Vadillo kayaking by her side, Banducci swam across Lake Erie, a 21-kilometre journey from Sturgeon Point, New York to Fort Erie on Saturday, Aug. 24.

It's a goal she has been working on since she began a part-time job as a swimming instructor at Vadillo's business, Embrace Swimming Aquatic Centre on Kings Cross Road last fall.

Banducci, a performing arts student at St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School, used the swim as a way to raise funds more than $11,000 for Defend Dignity, a registered charity dedicated to fighting sexual exploitation in Canada. It's a cause she is passionate about and one that she doesn't feel is discussed enough.

"I realize it’s big around us, we just can’t see it and we never have talked about it in school," she said. "I’m in high school and we have several talks about anti-bullying and drugs, but I’ve never had a talk about what could possibly happen to me.”

Banducci said she was prompted to do more research on sexual exploitation after she heard about two 18-year-old men luring 13-year-old girls from a middle school close to her home.

“This was 15 minutes from my house, but nobody had a clue this had happened,” she said.