Stuck at home during COVID-19, Gen Z started charities
Nothing has spurred the entrepreneurial spirit of Gen Z quite like the COVID-19 pandemic and that extends to launching nonprofits
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 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 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 during her sophomore year, starting a pilot program in Boston public high schools.
When COVID 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
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