The Cupcake Connection
Written by: awilens July 14th, 2010One of our amazing high school interns, Ashley Wilens, writes about one of her recent experiences working as part of the PoP team this summer.
Hi, I am Ashley Wilens, a rising senior at Elisabeth Irwin High School and I am a Pencils of Promise (PoP) intern. This isn’t my first time being a high school intern, but this is the first time that I feel a part of something big that will do so much good in the world. I was never a community service “buff,” who preached about saving the planet. I was much more focused on my group of close friends, surviving through junior year, and wondering why I didn’t have a boyfriend.
My main connection to community service was a school club I belong to called “Community Service Roundtable.” We raised money for a lot of good causes, like relief in Haiti, helping child soldiers in Uganda and GEMS. Though I loved what the Roundtable accomplishes and I started to feel a passion for helping these causes, I didn’t expect that when I went on Google and searched for “internships for teens” I’d land one at PoP and feel so passionate about the cause.
I have been helping to coordinate some of the details for PoP’s amazing annual summer fundraiser, the White Party. Planning a party sounded cool to me, especially since I have never helped coordinate something so big.
I have been contacting different companies trying to get donations for the White Party gift bags. This has been an interesting process for me because I got the opportunity to educate people about PoP’s mission. I recently contacted one major cupcake company and though I was pretty nervous about my outreach approach at first (maybe they’d think I was just a kid trying to score free cupcakes!) I quickly realized that with this really small act of placing a phone call I was actually doing something really important: creating a connection between cupcakes in New York and helping kids on the other side of the world get an education.
It’s the small acts that make all the difference!
Tags: Internship, NYC, The PoP Movement
