Teen entrepreneur honored for launching service connecting young volunteers with nonprofits
On Sept. 20, 18-year-old Purchase resident Ellie Zimmerman was named an honoree of the 2021 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, a national award celebrating the impact that young people have on their communities.
Zimmerman was recognized for the creation of Interns 4-Good, a service connecting tech-savvy teens with nonprofits in need of their skills.
Zimmerman launched Interns 4-Good in 2018, and to date has matched more than 12,000 remote volunteer interns with nearly 300 nonprofits to help with projects, including website design, Photoshop and social media outreach.
But the genesis of the project was not about matching thousands of teens with opportunities but finding a niche for herself.
“I had developed a passion for graphic design and I was looking for opportunities to apply my skills to a local business or a nonprofit,” she recalled. “And I was faced with several roadblocks — I was either too young or I lacked experience.
“And also, there was transportation as a huge barrier,” she continued, “because if I wanted to go and work at a local business, I would have to find a way to get there every day. And on top of having a busy schedule as a high school student, I had no time to engage in those opportunities.”
Zimmerman also realized those problems were shared by her peers at high school, noting that many of her fellow teens wanted to “find ways to give back and to engage in the community because there are so many incredible organizations around us and so many causes that young people these days are passionate about.”
Rather than concentrate on in-person volunteer activities, Zimmerman began to investigate remote work that she and her teen set could pursue. She focused on technology-focused opportunities within cash- and personnel-strapped nonprofit offices and quickly realized there was a need to be filled.
“I realized that several organizations had a lot of these projects piling up and that they couldn’t necessarily tackle all of them at once,” she said. “It wasn’t their priority to do things like remodel their website or organize a photo library. I thought about all of our tech-savvy teens and realized there was some overlap and that I could create a solution.”
Zimmerman organized Interns 4-Good during the summer after her freshman year and created a business plan that she entered in a Google Grant competition, where she won a $400 prize that she used to file for nonprofit status.
She has since grown her platform from a local to a national endeavor that currently has approximately 15,000 young people signed up and roughly 7,000 engaged in opportunities serving about 300 nonprofits.
In September, shortly before receiving news of her Barron Prize honors, Zimmerman began her freshman year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She is now running Interns 4-Good with the help of what she described as a “leadership team” of liked-minded teens from across the country, noting they “stepped up to take on parts of what used to be entirely my job,” including maintaining a Slack channel and social media pages and screening volunteers who want to participate in the service.
“Those things used to be things that I did all by myself, and I was drowning in work and really trying to keep up with all of it,” she said, adding her team members are “such incredible young people who have inspired me to keep going with everything that I’m doing. We’ve almost developed like a little family and have weekly meetings on Zoom.”
Zimmerman”™s college studies are focused on human and organizational development, which she hopes to leverage for future entrepreneurial efforts. She is hoping to further expand Interns 4-Good, observing that as long as there is “a huge market of people who are interested, then I will absolutely continue it and hopefully have even a larger team of people who can help me to run it.”