We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Iris Lai. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Iris below.

Iris, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Letters of Gold was founded during the peak of the pandemic in April 2020 after a text I sent to the other co-founder, Vedha Vaddaraju, at 1 AM. We noticed how hard the frontline workers were working, and we wanted to contribute to their fight. Thus, by 2 AM, we decided that we were going to do that by spreading encouragement to these workers through letters of resilience, which are collected through our website (lettersofgold.org) and were distributed amongst numerous healthcare workers. As our small project grew, we eventually wanted to spread light to more underrepresented groups of people who needed a push of positivity. We implemented our system now, which is to change the group we collect letters for every couple of months. By doing this, we were able to spread love to cancer patients, domestic abuse survivors, girls in STEM, and many more throughout the world.

Iris, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

As someone who has been passionate about technology, science, and healthcare for a long time, I wanted to use these passions to fuel a project that could also inspire others. Letters of Gold was first started when Vedha and I were 15 years old and freshmen in high school. Vedha is a B.S./M.D. candidate at the University of Rochester, and I am currently an undergraduate biomedical engineering student with a business minor at Case Western Reserve University. Working on Letters of Gold helped push me into studying this. Interacting with such inspiring groups and bringing smiles to their faces pushed both me and Vedha to pursue careers where we can continue helping others through our passions. From partnering with the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative to host white ribbon builds to sending letters and poems to hospital patients in Rwanda through two outstanding young women in the Gashora Girls’ School, each project motivates us to continue bringing light to these underrepresented groups and being the light at the end of the tunnel for them. The use of our accessible website to spread the power of words is something that makes us unique and easy to work with/contribute to. I’m proud of our growth within the past four years and excited to see what the future holds for LOG!

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I met Vedha on a bus at the beginning of 9th grade. We were both involved in speech and debate, and we were traveling back to our high school from a debate tournament. Before we started talking on the ride back, Vedha and I did not interact at all, which was surprising considering that we both did the same type of debate, public forum. However, from our bus talk onwards, we quickly became inseparable best friends and share similar goals, mentalities, and drives. Thus, we worked on many projects together, with Letters of Gold being our biggest one.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Creating and running an organization throughout high school was a very difficult feat that presented many challenges. Oftentimes, Vedha and I had so much on our plate when it came to extracurriculars and schoolwork, especially when junior and senior year rolled around with college app season looming over us, that we couldn’t put much effort into LOG. This, in turn, made us slow down quite a lot, which meant that the amount of letters that we collected and distributed fell. When we realized this, we came up with a plan to boost our organization back to the way it was and continue expanding from there. LOG was rebranded, with a more updated website and social media pages, and we started expanding into doing projects outside of letter collecting, such as white ribbon builds, fundraisers, and drives. Thanks to our patient brainstorming and board of directors, our organization is now better than ever.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lettersofgold.org
• Instagram: lettersofgold.organization
• Facebook: lettersofgold.organization