Having lived in the East Lake community for over 11 years, I have always believed in providing a second chance and its effects. This idea struck home when I realized that our communities have enough resources for those uncared for, but these resources are often left unused or unheard of due to the lack of information. For example, there are over 40 daytime shelters and ten cold shelters throughout Metro Atlanta capable of providing temporary housing to over 2000 people; however, the first time I heard of this was on social media. When was the last time that you walked around the city and saw homeless people with phones? This information wasn't reaching the people that needed it the most and this had to change. There needed to be a first step in providing this information to the homeless population in Atlanta.

That's why I founded First Step: Serve, a student-led program that seeks to help local homeless with temporary housing, hygiene kits, and transportation to help them with re-entry into society. Our goal was simple, to provide as many people as possible with these kits that provided an instruction booklet to find temporary shelters, a toothbrush, travel-sized bottles containing personal care products, and a metro card that came with two rides for transportation. These kits would be distributed every month in different neighborhoods around Metro Atlanta. However, we still needed to find a way to fund all of this. Initially, one of the group members came up with the idea of crowdfunding on websites like Kickstarter or GoFundMe. However, after a month, we realized that this wasn't working. There weren't any incentives for people to donate to this organization that no one had heard of, so we had to resort to fundraising by selling donuts and chocolate bars. Eventually, we raised enough to distribute our first set of kits after two months. We set out for two hours of distribution time, but within 30 minutes, everyone was back. We only had 15 kits that day, but the demand for the kits was much greater than that. We needed more kits and a more effective way to get the products in these kits.

Luckily, one of the teachers at Drew was able to provide us with contacts to food banks and supply centers that he's volunteered at before. We were able to get in touch with these centers, and they told us that we could get the products for free if we were able to pick them up. These organizations solved many problems for us, as we no longer needed to spend as much time to fundraise, and we were able to distribute kits much more frequently than we did before. We also now had connections to local food banks which we could also include in our instruction booklets.

Over the course of two years, our small group of five became a family of 20. We have managed to distribute over 40 kits every month since January 2021. But that's just the beginning. In the future, I hope to grow this student-led organization to multiple cities across America, partnering with community food banks, shelters, and correction centers. While advancing our service by creating individualized kits for people with different needs. I also plan to connect First Step: Serve with local programs that can provide re-entry assistance for the homeless population. These programs may include anything ranging from job training, substance abuse help, mental health programs, education, and even employment. I believe that this organization will allow for the different parts of the re-entry process to work together and at a higher efficiency as we continue to be the First Step in assisting those who deserve a second chance.