We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michelle Ellis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Michelle thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

As I was thinking about my purpose in life and was on a mission to create something to recognize young people, I thought about creating a youth awards program. My goal was to seek out and spotlight exceptional youth. When I thought about the name for the nonprofit what came to mind was recognizing YOU. Meaning recognizing the youth. That’s when I came up with The YOU Awards International. The “Y” represents Young, The “O” represents Outgoing and The “U” represents Uplifting. We serve others which makes it all about YOU!

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?

The decision to start a nonprofit was important in my quest to do something with meaning in the community. I am one of those people who loves helping and volunteering my time for a good cause. The idea that I could do something like what I am doing now came from years of volunteering with a very popular awards show that had a presence across the country. We would recognize major celebrities and world leaders each year. My thought was to do this sort of recognition with our youth. So I gathered a team people who saw the vision and understood the mission. We set out to find young people between the ages of 10-22 who were excelling in various areas and tell their stories. There are 7 areas that we spotlight our youth in which include academics, sports, technology, fine arts, entertainment, business and community service. Each year we honor the young people with an award show that is televised in addition each honoree is given a trophy and a one time merit award. The thing that I am most proud of is how much the young people and their families appreciate our efforts. Some of the past honorees are so inspired that they come back to be presenters on stage or volunteer at the event. It also warms my heart when past honors contact us to let us know about their continued successes. We’ve had entertainment honorees to land major TV and movie roles. Our business honorees have continued to grow their businesses and have become extremely successful and our academic honorees share with us the many universities they have been accepted into.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

For us we are still building our reputation in the market, but our goal is to continue to spread positivity. There is so much going on in the world that we need organizations like The YOU Awards International. We support our youth!

Any advice for managing a team?

As a nonprofit organization we have to always focus on the mission. That is the mission of others. As long as we keep our eyes on spotlighting and supporting our young people the team stays on a positive path. So any advice I would offer is to stay positive, listen to your team and build together.

Contact Info:

• Website: youawardsinternational.org
• Instagram: youawardsinternational
• Facebook: @youawardsinternational
• Twitter: @YouAwardsIntl