Arohi Bhattacharya – Spring 2021 Award Recipient

Arohi is a junior at Palo Alto High School and a current member of our board! Her project was through Get Involved Foundation where she worked with the nonprofit My New Red Shoes to provide resources for underrepresented kids. Watch her interview with Get Involved Foundation here. Read her project write-up below.

In the summer of 2019, I interned as an incoming sophomore at a nonprofit organization called My New Red Shoes, an organization dedicated to providing resources such as shoes, clothing and school materials to underprivileged youth and students in the Bay Area for the incoming school year(s) in hopes of improving their self-esteem, education and quality of life. Along with staff members and directors, I contributed to organizing and working at shoe-drive events across Silicon Valley, as well as developed marketing strategies in order to advertise the company more easily and efficiently. Being able to work with such enthusiastic and resourceful people, I saw the quantitative and qualitative impacts on not only society and the nearby communities but my personal growth as a whole. That summer, we contributed to collecting a total of over $900,000 in 2019 with events, partnerships, fundraising and others, a great increase from the previous year. As my first internship and work experience with nonprofits, the project helped me engage with other people and understand what it means to hold a leadership position, and allowed me to develop the communication, collaboration and organization skills that are essential for the future. I saw how understanding the needs of a community permits you to work with them better and ultimately succeed in the universal goal of nonprofit organizations, to serve the community in a mutually beneficial way (physically, mentally and socially!). The project at My New Red Shoes gave me such a passion for nonprofit work that it led me to being a board member, specifically an webinar and outreach manager, at Get Involved Foundation, and to establish and solidify connections with other organizations as my role. Throughout the course of my internship, I’ve learned the importance of nonprofit work, which not only fulfills your self in terms of your confidence and experience but also directly impacts the community and those around you, the ones you give to.