Innov8ing the Concept of Youth Volunteering

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Aug. 8, 2014 - PRLog -- Two months after its inception, Innov8Young is a rising nonprofit that is providing volunteer connections to students across five different states. Its ultimate goal: to replicate such connections across the entire United States.

In late May, LAMP High School student Venkata Macha was working on a website as a pastime programming project—until he realized it could be used to help high school students who wanted access to volunteer opportunities.

Using the website, Macha teamed with friends far away—Luis Gonzalez (Western High School; Miami, FL) and Miriam Katz (Hall High School; Hartford, CT)—and his programming friend close by—Adarash Mishra (LAMP High School; Montgomery, AL)—to manually connect students to local volunteer opportunities free of charge.

Surprised by the momentum, the team realized that manually matching students wasn’t going to work. As a result, they began working to create a website that offered a customized search engine.

Following several hours of programming and multiple Skype meetings, the team recently introduced a working website for people to use to search internships in their area.

To date, the website has garnered 200 volunteer opportunities in the launching states--a number that just seems to grow.

After they add more internships into the database, their next directive involves contacting schools to allow parents and students to use their service.

The team hopes that they can someday let individual users add internships of their own into the database.

You can find their website at: http://innov8young.com/