Reported by Samuel Li
Across the nation, over 1.5 million public school students experience homelessness, with even more disadvantaged kids from low-income families. For these students, education is already hard with limited access to technology and supplies coupled with questionable quality of education they receive. Furthermore, given the COVID-19 Pandemic and the ensuing quarantine, the situation for them worsened, as stable internet and usable technology rise from a luxury to a necessity for online schools.
Although there are several public and private programs aimed providing these children aid, the volunteers at AYLUS San Diego Branch decided to take action in giving disadvantaged students in their local community a chance to reach new heights.
Establishing the solutions for hope series of weekly events, AYLUS volunteers opened up classes to their fellow students, in a wide array of topics. Teaching 4 levels of both elementary school math and English, and multiple classes in competition math and coding, volunteers taught 15 classes to over 75 local students. From these classes, San Diego Branch organized a fundraiser for disadvantaged students in the community, encouraging students to donate. After just two months, AYLUS San Diego volunteers raised $10,470 to provide technology to local students in need.
Afterwards, San Diego Branch contacted several local programs for disadvantaged kids, in order to best ensure that their donation will be used effectively and responsibly. After much research, they decided on Monarch School. Monarch School is a public K-12 school in the area committed to assisting homeless kids in breaking the cycle of poverty through education, helping them develop hope for a future with the necessary skills and experiences for personal success. With such an important mission, AYLUS San Diego decided to assist their graduating class of 22 seniors with brand new HP 14″ Intel Core i3 – 1080p 8GB MEMORY 256 GB SSD laptops to be given to seniors upon their graduation, in accordance to Monarch School’s recommendation. Accompanying these laptops were hand-written graduation cards by volunteers, encouraging the seniors to keep reaching for greater heights.
On the day of the donations, the following volunteers delivered the laptops to Monarch School: Chengda Li, Chengming Li, Eric Lin, YiCheng Liu, Nathan Yang, and Daniel Zhou.
San Diego Branch volunteers raised $10,470 to donate Laptops to 22 Disadvantaged Students struggling with Homelessness on November 12th, 2021.
