We were lucky to catch up with Julianna Schneider, Aidan Schneider recently and have shared our conversation below.

Julianna Schneider, Aidan Schneider, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Julianna: Growing up I regularly helped organize food drives, collect donations for orphanages, and tutor fellow students. I didn’t classify these occasions as “volunteer work” — I saw people in need and had the ability to help, so I did. When I was in a international school in Albania, I saw my American peers struggle to find volunteer work while the nonprofits in the Albanian community struggled to find enough volunteers to run their initiatives. My peers had good intentions and the desire to pursue them — had the energy, moral insight, and knowledge to help others — but lived lives isolated from those in need. Because my father is American and my mother Albanian, I realized I was in a unique position to connect these two groups, so I set out to build the missing link, VoluntYOU — a digital platform that eliminates the circumstantial barriers to consistent volunteering. When I launched the VoluntYOU iOS app on the AppStore in June 2020, I was passionate about the idea and the friends I volunteered with shared my excitement, but I still was unsure how it would land with my general age cohort. I was creating something new for which there was no promise of success, but I went for it with a mix of hope and curiosity and a lot of trepidation. And I’m glad I did. Within a day of launching, VoluntYOU ranked #77 on the local Lifestyle Top Charts. By the end of the summer of 2020, 150+ users had registered and over 30 volunteering events had been hosted through VoluntYOU. In January 2021, VoluntYOU won the Congressional App Challenge 2020 in Nevada’s 2nd District. In April 2021, I presented VoluntYOU to the US House of Representatives. Since then, VoluntYOU has been featured on Forbes and on ABC’s KOLO 8 News Now TV programming on two separate occasions. Through these opportunities and recognition, I realized that like-minded volunteers ranging from Albania to Nevada saw the same gap I did and saw VoluntYOU as the solution. So in May 2021, I set out to grow VoluntYOU into an international nonprofit of students working together to streamline the volunteering process, establishing our executive suite to lead project development and our VoluntYOU Ambassador program to provide a direct connection between Ambassadors’ local communities and VoluntYOU. Aidan: Having volunteered at VoluntYOU events since the app’s initial launch, I felt a strong connection to our community of volunteers and nonprofits and decided to join the VoluntYOU team at this time, taking on the responsibilities of Chief of Operations and Ambassador to Reno, Nevada. Julianna and I worked together to recruit VoluntYOU Ambassadors and work with each Ambassador to develop unique strategies for interacting with their community’s volunteering scene. We prioritize this one-on-one collaborative approach between our executive suite and VoluntYOU Ambassadors because we see our relationship with our ambassadors as cyclical. In the process of sharing VoluntYOU with their local community, Ambassadors learn more about the needs of our potential users and provide valuable feedback for ongoing improvements to the VoluntYOU platform.
Julianna: With the invaluable support of the Community Foundation of Northern Nevada’s Youth Engaged in Service Fund, I founded the VoluntYOU nonprofit, obtained 501(c)(3) status, and provisionally patented the VoluntYOU platform. As of today, VoluntYOU has connected over 500+ users around the world to 115+ volunteering events that align with their skills and interests. What started as a personal passion project has turned into a community of like-minded helpers using the technology I built to maximize the impact of their altruism while simultaneously broadening the good our organization can create.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

VoluntYOU is a volunteering platform that seamlessly connects volunteers to verified community service organizations (CSOs) and academic institutions.

The challenge in volunteering is doing so effectively. In creating VoluntYOU we had a guiding question: how can we help volunteers make the biggest possible difference? Through continuous researching, prototyping, testing, and developing we’ve arrived at a tool we believe can really help people make a meaningful impact in their local communities.

Here’s how VoluntYOU works:

Volunteers: Volunteering opportunities are available through the Event Feed, which filters its results to present volunteers with opportunities that align with their skills and interests. Volunteers can learn more about and discover new local community service organizations (CSOs) through their profiles. Through event pages, volunteers can request to attend volunteering events that appeal to them. As volunteers help out in their community, their efforts are automatically logged in the History and Profile sections. Volunteers can then receive ongoing accreditation from their academic institution for their community service efforts by registering as a school’s student.

Community Service Organizations (CSOs): By posting their events on VoluntYOU, CSOs immediately connect with a community of like-minded helpers who are ready to take part in their mission. They can then review requests from volunteers interested in attending their events in just a few minutes, using volunteers’ profiles as a guide. Through their CSO profile, volunteers can discover more about the CSOs that sponsor the events they’re passionate about. In addition, VoluntYOU conveniently logs all event data, including event details and rosters, provided by CSOs on our platform for easy access.

Academic Institutions: By registering volunteers as an academic instituion’s students on VoluntYOU, academic institutions eliminate the need for manual record-keeping and the inevitably errors it entails. With the click of a button, academic institutions immediately receive a personalized PDF report on the volunteering activities their students take part in, enabling them to accredit the wide range of activities through which their students contribute to their community. By using VoluntYOU, academic institutions vastly expand the range of community service events they can reliably accredit, encouraging students to volunteer regularly by enabling them to do so with CSOs that align with their skills and interests.

In short, VoluntYOU provides a better way to volunteer, turning good intentions into great outcomes by combining altruism with data and reason.

Biographies:

Julianna is a U.S. Presidential Scholar, National Merit Scholar, Congressional App Challenge Winner, the National High School AIAA Lockheed Martin Marilyn Hewson Scholar, and a FTC Dean’s List Finalist. She led three FIRST robotics teams to win state, regional, and international awards and a team of NASA interns to publish research with the American Geophysical Union. Julianna created VoluntYOU, an award-winning, 501(c)(3)-backed digital platform that connects 500+ users to volunteering opportunities globally. She mentors NASA summer programs, Science Olympiad, and FIRST robotics programs. She conducts research on improving human-robot collaboration using a pipeline of machine learning models. Julianna has been recognized by the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, and the Office of the Governor of Nevada for her achievements and excellence. Julianna is an incoming freshman at MIT who will major in AI & Decision Making.

Aidan Schneider is a student at the Davidson Academy of Nevada dual-enrolled at the University of Nevada, Reno. As a NASA SEES intern, Aidan developed four machine learning models to forecast West Nile Virus infections five weeks in advance. He is a FIRST robotics competitor and volunteer of 7 years and captain of the FIRST Tech Challenge team 21217 The Phoenixes. He built RoboConnect, an app that enables robotics teams to network across geographical divides. RoboConnect won 1st Place in the Congressional App Challenge 2021 for Nevada’s 2nd District and was presented to the US House of Representatives in April 2022. Aidan is the Engineering Lead of the #1 US STEM High School’s Science Olympiad team and is a 1st Place WiFi Lab event winner, 1st Place Detector Building event winner, and a 2nd Place Remote Sensing event winner.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Julia: VoluntYOU started from nothing. It was just an idea I strongly believed in. It started only with my own personal skills, my own resources, and my small network. I convinced my parents to pay all the developer fees and software to develop promotional material to enable VoluntYOU’s initial launch on the AppStore in June 2020. I found out soon that other people believed in my idea as well and started using my platform. In May 2021, the Community Foundation of Northern Nevada’s Youth Engaged in Service Fund awarded their highest grant ($2,500) to VoluntYOU based on its demonstrated community impact. This grant has covered all our expenses since. As the grant enabled VoluntYOU to obtain 501(c)(3) status, we are working towards providing a variety of donation options for both platform users and larger organizations to support our work.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Julianna: To maintain high morale choose altruism as a person and as a leader. In our case this was easy, VoluntYOU is a volunteering organization and it was natural for me to connect my purpose with my leadership style, but I think altruism is a great way to foster cooperation and commitment in any organization. Obviously this kind of approach works only if the people in your organization share your values and are committed to assisting you in making your organization the kind of enterprise you’re striving to be. VoluntYOU has 18 ambassadors in 14 states across 5 continents. They are committed and care about helping others, we share the same values and everything else flows from that. Also our decisions are not made solely by me as a CEO, we have distributed authority. It is a group of equals. Aidan: Our decisions are based on the information we get from our ambassadors in loco and the strength of each of their arguments. We are able to make better decisions through this collective leadership and we consequently have better team morale and commitment. As a result of our Ambassadors’ feedback our volunteers have established the first NASA ASTRO CAMP in Nevada that has brought free NASA STEM camps to 158 underserved K-12 students in under 2 months, provided 2000+ burritos and other essentials to Nevada’s homeless population each month, helped provide 180+ hours of free tutoring in Florida and Cyprus, aided in the vaccination of 1,200 individuals a day in Italy, registered hundreds of signatures for women’s rights legislation in Albania, and curated informational resources and donation links to aid civilians in Ukraine.
Julianna: Choosing to avoid the traditional top-down structure, to distribute authority, and to empower our Ambassadors resulted in more commitment. Impact and progress followed automatically. It is also important as a CEO to remain humble, to listen to your people and to always act with the utmost integrity. That fosters high morale as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://voluntyou.org/#
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/voluntyou
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/voluntyou/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/voluntyou
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/voluntyou
• Youtube: NA
• Yelp: NA
• Other: NA

Image Credits
3FE024BB-938C-4E6D-9CBD-68759153BDBA.jpg and DSC08146.jpg were taken by Blaize Abuntori of the Reno Burrito Project https://renoburritoproject.com/about. All other images were taken by VoluntYOU affiliates.