to recruit a team of high school students to form a Leadership Circle to which she could delegate tasks. Within three days of reaching out to the Interns 4-Good volunteers, Ellie had chosen 19 exceptional students from across the country to help her lead the organization. “It was amazing!” Ellie recalls. “Dozens of complete strangers raised their hands, offering to do whatever it takes to scale Interns 4-Good. I feel so lucky to be working with such talented, hardworking volunteers.” Nowadays, members of the Leadership Team have specialized tasks and objectives, communicate regularly using Slack and meet every Sunday over Zoom to discuss current and upcoming projects for Interns 4-Good.
Amidst the hardships and challenges of living in a COVID-19 world, the pandemic has allowed for Interns 4-Good to expand in many ways. “Traffic to our website has surged,” exclaims Ellie. Each day the Interns 4-Good website is visited by about 2000 people and the number of applications continues to grow. As schools switched to remote learning this past spring, Interns 4-Good saw a backlog of over 300 eager high school students hopeful to volunteer. With many nonprofits busy navigating the challenges of COVID-19, Ellie was faced with a new obstacle. “It was stressful taking on so many excited volunteers,” Ellie recalls. “We needed another way to engage them in volunteering. After speaking to my aunt, a second grade teacher in Harlem, I learned about the challenges that online learning was creating for parents and teachers everywhere. Our leaders conducted a survey in each of their local areas and received feedback from elementary school students that some of their lesson plans were ‘really boring’.” Ellie and her team, as great leaders do, quickly shifted gears and launched Interns 4-Good in the Classroom. Within a week, Interns 4-Good had created over 100 new projects to help students, parents and teachers. Some examples include:
Troubleshooting online platforms for parents and teachers. Specifically, Ellie has 60 bilingual teen volunteers who have been helping Spanish speaking parents.
Creation of over 30 pre-recorded project-based curriculums around interesting topics. Interns 4-Good has developed this template for volunteers to follow. If a teacher is interested in a curriculum on a specific topic,volunteers can create a custom lesson plan for them and teach it live in their virtual classroom. Recent curriculum topics include entrepreneurship, journalism, poetry, and an introduction to the stock market. Check out this link for more lessons!
Continued partnership with Learn to Be to offer free one-on-one online tutoring to hundreds of students.
This summer, Interns 4-Good has continued to make a difference as students and families navigate COVID-19 by offering a free virtual summer camp. Designed for lower and middle school students, the camp offers a mix of both online and offline guided activities with a new lesson, project and theme each day. Through the Interns 4-Good Summer Camp, Ellie hopes to enrich students’ learning through interactive lesson plans while also keeping the students entertained through physical activities.
In just over a year after launching Interns 4-Good, Ellie has touched thousands of lives. She took the leadership skills she gained at Alzar School and directly applied them to a passion, creating a revolutionary platform. Building a Leadership Circle of other motivated youth, she has delegated and drawn upon their talents to expand Interns 4-Good and the positive impact it has for both youth and worthy causes. Ellie’s inspiring vision and resilience has helped her adapt to and flourish in light of COVID-19. We could not be more proud of her leadership and the positive impact she is making through Interns 4-Good.