Stuck at home in pandemic, Gen Z jump-starts charities
Kate Nelson was in Los Angeles pursuing her passion for stand-up comedy and theater when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The senior at Emerson College had just spent a few hundred bucks on headshots and through her internship had made some connections at HBO.
But when COVID-19 shut down the country, she was back home in western Massachusetts within days. A few weeks later, her older brother called: “Are you bored? We’re doing this thing, getting food from farms to food banks. We need people to help us fundraise.”
That thing became the Farmlink Project, which leveraged the COVID-19 downtime of 600 college seniors to quickly build a sizable nonprofit with volunteer labor. As laid-off workers streamed into food banks in the first months of the pandemic, Farmlink helped meet the need — delivering over 50,000 pounds of produce in just one month.
“It didn’t matter that you weren’t being paid because you had your high school bedroom to fall back on,” Nelson says.
Nothing has spurred the entrepreneurial spirit of Gen Z quite like the pandemic.
As a high school junior in suburban Philadelphia shortly after the 2016 election, Jahnavi Rao founded New Voters, which helps high school students run voter registration drives in their schools. She put the fledgling charity on hold when she enrolled as a freshman at Harvard University in 2018 but revived it in her sophomore year, starting a pilot program in Boston public high schools.
When COVID-19 hit, New Voters took off, Rao says: “High school and college students had a lot of time on their hands.”
The charity has now
worked with 300 Gen Z interns in more than 400 high schools.
In the spring of 2020, a Stanford computer science major named Mary Zhu saw people complaining on social media that their internships had been canceled.
Zhu and another Stanford student, Amay Aggarwal, came up with the idea of connecting computer-science majors in search of work experience with charities that needed help with tech projects, such as building websites. That idea became the charity Develop for Good, which now has 1,500 student applicants vying for 300 volunteer slots twice a year.
“People were isolated at home,” Zhu says. “COVID was a big catalyst.”
Gen Z charities like New Voters, Develop for Good, and Farmlink may be positioned to scale more quickly than similar efforts in the past, thanks to young leaders who are accustomed to tapping their social networks.
Sam Underhill grew up in a small town in Indiana and learned about a fellowship opportunity with the Bill of Rights Institute after his AP History teacher forwarded him an email she had found in her junk folder. The program, which focuses on
the role of government and entrepreneurship in civil society, includes virtual programming through the school year and concludes with a week in Philadelphia and Washington.
Underhill says he found the experience transformative but also came away puzzling over the role that luck played in his learning about the fellowship. Many high school students have little idea about the range of internships and fellowships that are available, he says. Last summer, he started ActivateGenZ, a nonprofit website that aims to aggregate civic and government internships on a state-bystate basis.
Now a freshman at the University of Alabama, Underhill says he’s brought on 28 “community organizers” to compile opportunities at the local and state levels. He connects with people interested in volunteering through LinkedIn or Instagram.
The new charities are attracting volunteers because young people get to do real work, either in person or remotely.
“Gen Z wants to get involved, and they really want to get involved in ways that are meaningful,” Rao says. “They don’t want to only be doing the grunt work.”