At the heights of the pandemic, my friends and I got together to prepare brown bag meals for a local homeless shelter in the D.C. area. On our way to delivering the meals, we passed through a low-income community and the local highschool there. I was appalled at the condition in which the school grounds...
**By Isabel Mathew** It was a hot pandemic day and business was bustling at the local Creamery where I held a summer job. The Creamery had just announced another price hike—the third within a short span of two years. That afternoon, the other employees and I wondered why the flow of customers hadn’t decreased despite...
**By Isabel Mathew** For as long as I could remember, the models I had seen on TV and in magazines were slender, mostly white, and tall. I didn’t see my ethnicity, as a person of Indian origins, or even the body types of most of the people I know represented much on the colorful spreads...
**By Isabel Mathew** Was it all in my head? As a five-year-old, I used to take long 10-hour drives with my family from Bangalore, India, to visit my grandparents in Kerala, the southernmost state of India. Meandering through the highways connecting the two states, I would often gaze up at the starry sky and wonder...
*By Serena Karam* After getting FacilitatingConnections up and running for what seems like months, it was finally time to find our first donor. However before that, we needed to make sure that we had a beneficiary in place ready to take our donations. As the beneficiary captain, I assigned my team to contact different places...
*By Kendall Ladd* One of the first donors I reached out to was the Chick-Fil-A in Reston. I called and emailed them, but unfortunately, they were unable to donate to us because they were already working with other organizations. I knew that Chick-Fil-A was very active in donating and helping the community, so I decided...
*By Andrea Karam* After many hours of researching donors, we finally reached out to Pio Pio Pollo whose response was extremely positive and very willing to help us out on our mission. After visiting the store and speaking to the manager, they offered to do everything they could to help us with finding food for...
*By Caden Ghannam* It was April 7th, 2020, a week after the mandatory lockdown was placed to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19. The severity of this pandemic had really set in, and I became driven to help as many people suffering due to the shutdown of our economy as possible. I, then, contacted many...
*By Nathaniel Mathew* With 235,000 deaths and 9.6 million cases of infection in mid-autumn of 2020, the US stood disempowered before the rising rates of Covid-19 infection across the nation (1). Several factors contributed to the rise in infections across the U.S. such as ill-preparedness to combat the infection, slow defense strategies, insufficient education among the...
