Katherine Wei – Spring 2021 Award Recipient

Our next award recipient for the spring 2021 cohort is Katherine Wei, a junior at BASIS Chandler. Her project is called the Alliance of Youth Leaders in the US (AYLUS), which is a 501(c)3 student-run non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of our communities. Watch her interview with Get Involved Foundation here. Read her write-up of the project below.

In the summer before my sophomore year (June 2019), I co-founded the Phoenix, Arizona branch (http://aylus.org/branches/phoenix-arizona/) alongside two of my friends. I currently serve as the president of the Phoenix branch, which has grown to over 100 members since our founding. Prior to the pandemic, we organized over 100 events, which consisted of playing music at senior centers, packing food at food banks, cleaning up local parks, giving educational seminars, helping out at marathons, raising money for charity, teaching seniors English, and lots of others. During the pandemic, we focused our efforts on fundraising to buy personal protective equipment (PPE) for high-risk areas around the Phoenix region. We sold our digitally designed stickers and picked over 500 pounds of oranges from our members’ backyards and sold them through a virtual platform. From those fundraisers, we were able to buy and donate over 8k face masks to hospitals, schools, police stations, and senior centers. These donations were greatly appreciated by the frontline workers. From our efforts, I was awarded the Gold Presidential Volunteer Service Award (PVSA), along with 12 other Phoenix AYLUS members receiving the PVSA as well. Furthermore, the Phoenix branch has consistently been awarded the Branch of the Month and even Branch of the Year from 2019-2021.

Last month, I was elected to be the co-president of the national board of AYLUS. The year before that, from May 2020-May 2021, I was elected and served as the co-vice president of the national board of AYLUS after only one year since my joining AYLUS. As co-vice president, I worked alongside the other national board members in carrying out monthly leadership summits and other AYLUS national events where countless branches from across the country participated in. Last year when the pandemic first began, I spearheaded a partnership between national AYLUS and the Intel Chinese Employee Network (ICEN) to raise a total of $75,000 to buy PPE for hospitals in Wuhan, China when COVID-19 was worse in China than in the US. 

I am also the deputy editor-in-chief of the AYLUS Times, which is a monthly newspaper that displays the significant service projects conducted by the branches in the nation.

Learn more about AYLUS at aylus.org!

In terms of personal growth, I have learned a lot about the most important qualities of successful leaders, such as open-mindedness and delegation. To lead, you must be able to consolidate a diverse group of people into a coherent team that can band together to solve problems as one.

Because AYLUS is such a large entity, open-mindedness has always been a driving force in bringing people together under a united entity to overcome adversity. Disagreements are inevitable especially when working in a team, but the way around that obstacle is to meet halfway.

Although I am strong in listening to other people’s ideas and being open-minded, prior to my experience with AYLUS, my skills with delegation were not as strong. I often enjoyed doing things all on my own because I trusted myself in completing them on time and to the best of my ability. Nevertheless, projects are often too large to be completed single-handedly, and attempting to do so is quite draining as I have experienced. Instead, having multiple people carry out specific activities almost always encourages new ideas and better innovation. Throughout my time with AYLUS, I always pushed myself out of that comfort zone and to ensure the work is split evenly among my teammates and that each person, including myself, is comfortable with the amount of work they are responsible for. On a similar note, I realized more and more that it’s always okay to ask for help. Being able to collaborate with others is how progress is made, and hence success.