Copyright Joliet, IL Patch
At AYLUS Marlboro, students bring their own ideas to the table and work together to create free programs that benefit the local community. MARLBORO, NJ — A group of local students is stepping up to help their local community by leading volunteer projects and providing free educational programs in Monmouth County. At AYLUS Marlboro, a branch of the Alliance of Youth Leaders in the United States (AYLUS), members aim to provide essential support and assistance to those in need through volunteer work, and to strengthen a “sense of community empowerment and togetherness.” Currently, high school senior Abhiansh Pathak serves as the president of AYLUS Marlboro, with fellow high school student Shriyan Parsa as vice president and high school senior Shreyans Shah as secretary. In an interview with Patch, Pathak and Shah talked about the work and projects AYLUS Marlboro has accomplished, as well as their goals for the organization going forward. “From early on in high school, we volunteered for many different organizations and had many different ideas ourselves about things we wanted to change in different parts of society,” Pathak said. “We wanted to put our foot in the door and see what we could do.” Though Pathak and Shah volunteered with various local organizations and groups over the years, they found that it was difficult to find volunteer work for specific causes that they cared about and employ solutions for those causes without a community standing behind them. To remedy this, Pathak told Patch that they made an AYLUS chapter in Marlboro to create a space where students like them could present their own volunteer causes and ideas and come together as a community to work together on projects for change. “The free exchange of ideas and how everybody is treated as a leader in our volunteer organization is something we specialize in at the Marlboro chapter,” Shah said. “That’s why we have such a wide array of different volunteer initiatives that we’ve looked into – because so many people feel strongly about a variety of causes, and by acting on all of them, we’re able to satisfy everybody’s wants and desire for impact.” At AYLUS Marlboro, Pathak and Shah said they’ve worked on a variety of projects with other students to support the local community, ranging from financial literacy workshops to a water testing initiative to reduce local pollution and coding workshops for students in low-income areas. For Pathak, one topic he told Patch that he's passionate about is the intersection of business and the environment. To bring this into his volunteer work, Pathak said that he’s worked on teaching local immigrants about the U.S. financial system and personal financial literacy, though he’s also assisted other AYLUS volunteers with their own passion projects and ideas. “Our mission is pretty simple: it’s to give students a space where they can lead the projects that really matter to them,” Pathak said. Though AYLUS Marlboro primarily works with local high school students, Pathak and Shah said their organization and their programs are open to anybody who's interested, as their main goal is to help people in Marlboro as well as empower local students. “Our goal for this Marlboro or Monmouth County area is empowering more students to lead their own ideas,” Pathak said. “Many people have great ideas, but they don’t always talk about them. We want to create a society where student-led projects are important and can lead to change rather than just staying in people’s minds.” “Going forward, we want to get more and more people and have more and more people’s ideas being spread,” Pathak continued. “The bigger the network, the more people we can affect.” To learn more about AYLUS Marlboro, you can visit their website.
