On Wednesday, the Karma for Cara team went to Evanston to meet with two groups of students at Northwestern University. These groups spent the last quarter in school utilizing the strategy of design thinking to promote youth volunteerism. We tasked the students with the mission of designing a way to make volunteering accessible and appealing to high school students. The students’ final projects were incredibly creative and left us very excited!

The first student group we met with, Caroline Borowski, Heesun Eom, Jiahui Guo and Abby Hofmeister, created Service for Others (S40), a phone application that employs user-friendly tools to connect high school students and engage them in service opportunities. Different functions of the application include a personality test to narrow down volunteer opportunities, scholarship finder to award students for their community service, and even the ability to link to facebook so friends are made aware of who is volunteering and where they are volunteering.

The second group (Adriana Braciak, Nick Philliips and Nicole Romane) created a Karma for Cara “club-in-a-box,” a physical box containing the necessary materials to start a community service club. The protoype for the box was designed to inspire students to participate in service, give students the tools and support necessary to start a club and find service opportunities and recognize students in hopes of promoting continued volunteerism.

These bright young adults’ hard work and dedication to K4C resulted in many innovative ideas that we look forward to utilizing as we continue to grow, develop, and plan the implementation of Karma for Cara Clubs in local schools and programs to increase youth volunteerism.

Caroline Borowski, Heesun Eom, Jiahui Guo and Abby Hofmeister

Club-in-a-box