We were lucky to catch up with Ethan Williams recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ethan , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

My love for community service began in 8th grade when my older brother, Ian, told me about a nonprofit he worked for up in Dallas. This nonprofit is called Camp Impact, which is a week-long camp for underprivileged and homeless kids in the Dallas and Fort Worth area. Once hearing and attending my first session at the camp, I ended up attending it every year since 8th grade. At the camp, I served as a counselor with kids aging from 5-13 years old. The camp means the world to me due to the impact you’re able to see you have on these young kids. The camp only lasts for a week, but you’re able to build such close connections and bonds with the kids in such little time. It’s an amazing experience because you are able to install confidence and show the children that you are there for them. This allows them to see that they are filled with value and are able to accomplish so much in the world. On the last day, we usually have a carnival or take the kids to the water park as a surprise and it’s a surreal experience. In such little time, you’re able to see how much you mean to the kids and vice versa. It has come to be like a second home due to the impact it’s had on my life. No matter what I do throughout the school year, nothing will ever top the joy I get from being at camp. Camp really gives you a chance to broaden your perspective on the real world issues that unfortunately many people have to encounter and go through. I believe it’s been an enormous reason for my motivation and drive to start Uplift Austin. It’s also allowed me to enconver a tremendous value and pillar in my life, which is the desire to serve others. Despite the feeling of tiredness and stress that school gives, I love doing philanthropy events for Uplift Austin such as our biweekly food drives, shoe drives and more. No matter the hardships in life, I always try to make it a priority in my schedule, it enriches my soul and those volunteering with me, because the act of service provided by Uplift Austin really makes you feel like you’re making a difference in this sometimes cruel world.”

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hello, my name is Ethan Williams and I’m a pre dental public health senior at UT Austin. My friend Katie Karp and I co founded Kappa Kappa Dub, a spirit org, and Uplift Austin, a non-profit in February 2021. During the horrific winter storm, sophomore Katie raised around $300 via Go Fund Me to purchase blankets and other necessities for people struggling with homelessness. After the storm settled, Katie and I went to Lady Bird Lake to distribute the materials. It was a surreal experience for us. Katie and I had the opportunity to speak and interact with many of these individuals living in the area. The winter storm left many Texas residents without electricity or water, making going to the restroom and living in a freezing house extremely difficult. However, I can’t imagine how resilient these individuals were to live outside doing this time, without a permanent shelter. This experience taught me to be more grateful and appreciative for the opportunities and resources that I have been provided and to also take care of other individuals who are not as privileged as I. In the critically acclaimed 2019 movie, “Parasite”, there is a heavy rainstorm that causes a flood that displaces many of the cities’ marginalized low income population. While the marginalized view the storm as a destructive and disruptive force, the wealthy in the mostly elevated city continue with their lives and see the storm as an opportunity to celebrate Spring. There is no malice among the celebrants. Their viewpoint, however, clearly paints the vastly different perspective that humans across many different socio-economic groups have. During the snowstorm, most Austinites were excited to expect snow, however, to Austin’s homeless population the snow brought trauma and a plethora of other problems. I started Uplift Austin because I wanted to energize and rejuvenate young people into doing work that could better help Austin’s most vulnerable population.
It’s been incredible to see how much the nonprofit has grown in its first year. With the help of one of my best friends Taha Tyebjee (our philanthropy director) and numerous help from my other friends we have been able to grow the nonprofit tremendously. We have been able to have food drives for the homeless biweekly by partnering with another nonprofit called Mission Impossible. This organization has played an essential role in providing resources to Austin’s homeless population since 1994. We also fundraised over $5,000, and used it to purchase and donate 183 pairs of shoes to Pickle Elementary School in Austin, Texas. We plan to continue the food and shoe drives in the future and also begin new service activities as well such as book and sock drives. I’m excited for this organization’s future progress and I invite others to join the mission. Follow us @uplift.atx to stay updated on future events and reach me at ethanwilliamz45@gmail.com about collaboration and to ask questions.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

My biggest advice when managing a team is to maintain a safe, diverse, and inclusive environment. It’s of utmost importance that your team feels comfortable with sharing their ideas. They should feel valued and heard. Another key component is to show appreciation for your team members and to compliment them on their service. A friendly and charismatic relationship is crucial to developing a more comfortable and enjoyable work atmosphere because it demonstrates that you have your members best interest in mind, which can strengthen their trust in you. Furthermore, once this relationship is established and you start to listen to your officers ideas, you will be able to gauge their strengths and weaknesses better. This grants the manager/leader the ability to put people in the best situations to succeed plus in positions that correspond to their proclivities, which consequently allows them to be efficient in their craft. With a joyful work environment, it creates a space where officers are more likely to advertise for the organization due to their positive work experience.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

This past year, I’ve pivoted my career path and started looking into business instead of my current field in health. At first, quite honestly, I was extremely petrified that I was beginning to perceive my degree as a waste of time and that I could have been gaining a more robust knowledge in business if I had majored in that field from the start. My freshman year, I truly had a passion and love for my science classes as I was able to expand my engagement with the material through office hours and a strong rapport with my teachers. However, this excitement started to decline once COVID hit and my classes moved to an online format. It became more difficult to maintain this sort of relationship I previously had with my professors as I could only communicate with them through a screen. Many of my classes were also asynchronous, which made it very difficult for me to engage with the class material because it was harder to stay focused in an online lecture. My passion for school greatly diminished during my sophomore year of college, which made me divert to my other passions such as community service and meeting new people. In February 2021 of my sophomore year, I founded my own nonprofit and spirit organization, Uplift Austin and Kappa Kappa Dub, with my best friend Katie Karp. These new ventures drastically changed the trajectory of my career path and life. Over the course of working on these two projects, I realized I had many skills that I had never acknowledged or recognized in the past, and I was able to develop and hone these skills as I worked on growing Uplift Austin and Kappa Kappa Dub. To be totally honest, before coming up with these two ideas, I never saw myself doing anything remotely in the field of business and was held fast to a path in pre-dental or pre-medicine. I knew I had strong people skills and some elements of creativity, but I never had any inclination to utilize these abilities outside of a STEM career. However, this mindset changed as I learned so many valuable skills in the first year of creating Uplift Austin and Kappa Kappa Dub. I discovered that I had an inherent ability to lead, manage organizations, plan events, and conduct business, and that these are skills I can utilize in my career in the future. Although I’m currently still a pre-dental student, I have really been enjoying what I can bring to the table from a business perspective. I’ve decided to keep my career options open and I’ve been exploring more business oriented fields, such as consulting and sales.
Over the course of this journey, I’ve discovered many important life lessons I wish I had known as a young college student. In high school, there is a simplistic notion that you have to be centered and grounded on a specific career path for forever, even though you’re viewpoint of the world is so limited. It’s completely unrealistic to believe an 18 year old knows exactly what they want to do in life and who they want to be, especially since they have such a limited life experience. It’s quite difficult to know exactly what you want to do in life when you have yet to meet more people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, who end up being the ones to truly shape and mold exactly what you want to do. College is an amazing experience as it’s your first time getting a taste of the real world. Not only do you meet like-minded people with similar aspirations, you also meet a variety of people who have completely different career paths as you. It is a truly wonderful time in life that opens you up to other people’s viewpoints, which in turn redefines who you truly are and what you want to do in life. College is a time of exploration and growth. Although change is uncomfortable, it is also necessary, as staying stagnant is not a place that we as humans should accept. Growth and change are the beauty of life, and in college it is so important to accept these new developments in life with grace and humility. Although I’m still deciding between business and predental, I do know that I want to continue serving people in underrepresented communities, whether it’s part of my job or something I do in my own time and that helping those in need brings me great value in life.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @uplift.atx @kappakappadub

Image Credits
Taha Tyebjee, Yunji Choi, Amy Wu, Chloe Bautista, Alyssa Alfaro, Abdul Ghani, Sharon Chai, Micaela Banda, Florence Fadipe, Mohammad Mustafa, Katie Karp, Wonhong Chu, Scott Friedewald, Angelica Gonzalez