LearnServe International is the best thing that has ever happened to me! LearnServe taught me how to be a CHANGEMAKER, a SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR, and a SPOKESPERSON FOR MY CAUSE. LearnServe has phenomenal cohort leaders who are trained to teach students how to launch and sustain ventures that will change their communities. LearnServe helped me to get my non-profit, ScholarCHIPS, off the group and currently serves as our fiscal agent. Without them my work would not be possible. It is thanks to LearnServe that I had the opportunity to get a scholarship and go to Zambia, Africa to spend 18 days doing service as a junior in high school. I would not change that experience for the world. LearnServe International is way beyond its years in innovation, using today's youth and preparing them to be tomorrow's leaders, while giving back to the United States community and to those abroad! Thank you LearnServe International...YOU ARE A GREAT NONPROFIT!
LearnServe changed my life. It opened my eyes to the vast world of challenges we face, but more importantly, it gave me the keys -- the knowledge, skills, and community -- to devise the solutions. Because of LearnServe, during my Junior year of high school I was able to launch a school-wide program to help empower more teens as movers and shakers within our community via social entrepreneurship. LearnServe gave me my first experience abroad--in Paraguay. Here, our delegation of young people collaborated with the local high schoolers there to design efforts aimed at alleviating poverty in the most destitute areas imaginable. LearnServe places teens in the drivers seats like no other organization. It is why I hope to give my life to something bigger. Every teen needs to experience the awesome impact of this organization.
I was fortunate enough to travel with LearnServe International to Zambia and Paraguay to work with HIV/AIDS and community development projects and participate in the DC based LearnServe Fellows Program. The organization works hard to live up to the name. Participants learn about community issues from local leaders and serve side-by-side, with the utmost respect for "sustainable development". The LearnServe Fellows program united me with a cohort of incredibly diverse DC Metro Area teens that desired to make lasting changes. Together, we learned how to build a socially conscious business/ non-profit model to address problems in the community. LearnServe changed my views about life so much, that I returned to Paraguay to independently practice sustainable "ground-up" development. Later, I retuned to LearnServe to help teach social entrepreneurship with the LearnServe Fellows Program. I highly recommend LearnServe International to all high school students in the greater Washington, DC Metro Area.
Often in our society, high school students are expected to act responsibly, and yet are not trusted enough with important jobs or positions. LearnServe International empowers students to discover that they have the potential to change the world. I was fortunate enough to participate in the program, and through their guidance was able to start a business by the time I was 17. LearnServe provided the kind of training, support, and motivation that I needed to become a social entrepreneur, and now I am in college and I’ve just won a business plan competition to start a new social venture. I owe my initial seed of inspiration entirely to LearnServe and I cannot thank them enough. The leaders at LearnServe provide an experience that is much like dunking each student in a barrel of freezing cold water; the program is entirely eye-opening and showed me a whole new world of entrepreneurship that was truly transforming.
