However, as we kept showing up, something stayed with us. So many people around us, especially young people, wanted to help but didn’t know where to start. The desire was there, but the pathways weren’t. Service often felt inaccessible, disconnected from the issues people actually cared about, or simply didn’t reflect the full diversity of those willing to give. At the same time, we were watching communities struggle with food insecurity, educational inequity, and the quiet weight of unmet needs, not because resources didn’t exist, but because systems failed to connect them to the people who needed them most.

That gap became our call to action. We wanted to reimagine service as something inclusive, intergenerational, and genuinely reachable for everyone, regardless of age, background, or ability. That belief is what carried us from those early volunteer days to founding the 501(c)(3) nonprofit NEST4US (www.nest4us.org), when Shreyaa was 13 and Esha was 10. We launched from our kitchen table in Ashburn, Virginia, without a nonprofit playbook, a board of directors, or any certainty that what we were building would last. We had a shared sense that something needed to change and the willingness to begin before we felt ready—and that was enough.

Then came a morning that made everything concrete.

One Sunday morning during a NEST4US event for our unhoused neighbors in Washington, D.C., our team was handing out blessing bags filled with toiletries and our signature “notes of hope,” handwritten messages our volunteers had contributed over the years through our kindness program, NEST Kares. Small, folded slips of paper that we were never entirely sure people read.

After the event wrapped up, a man approached us. He was holding something in his hands: a thick stack of folded papers. When he opened them, we realized what they were. Every note he had ever received from us that he had saved and carried with him through years of instability. He told us that on his worst days, he takes them out and reads through them, remembering that someone cared enough to see him.

Our young volunteers stood completely still. No one spoke. Here was a person whose life had been quietly shaped, year after year, by the consistency and compassion of youth who showed up and wrote something true. One story among the 125,000 notes of kindness NEST4US volunteers have shared over the past decade.

That moment reframed something important for us. Society often abstracts people into metrics, missing the emotional realities that actually shape lives. However, impactful service starts with proximity. It starts with being present, being consistent, and understanding what truly matters to the people you aim to serve. Young people are so often told they are too small to create real change. But one man had carried proof of the opposite in his hands for years.

That is why we founded NEST4US. And that morning reminded us exactly why we keep going.

One of the most persistent myths about volunteering is that it belongs to a certain type of person—someone with more time, more resources, more certainty about what they’re doing. At NEST4US, we’ve spent a decade proving that wrong. We’ve watched seven-year-olds and retirees work side by side at food distributions. We’ve seen families who once received groceries from us return the following week as volunteers. We’ve seen young people stand speechless in the presence of the impact they didn’t know they were making, week after week, event after event.

And now, what began as a small project ten years ago has grown into a global movement powered by 9,000+ volunteers from all walks of life, who have collectively generated $6.5 million in service value and impacted tens of thousands of people across the globe. The mission has always remained the same: to build a NEST where youth rise, families unite, and communities thrive.

A man in Washington, D.C. once showed us that the smallest acts—a handwritten note, a Sunday morning, a willingness to show up—can quietly hold someone together through years they never expected to survive. We think about him often. We think about all the people we haven’t yet met, whose lives might be shaped by a volunteer who decides, today, not to wait.

That is the American story, told not in monuments or milestones, but in the accumulated weight of ordinary people choosing each other, again and again, across 250 years—the most enduring thing this country has ever built. That is worth celebrating. That is worth continuing for the next 250 and beyond!

~Shreyaa and Esha Venkat, Ashburn, VA

In a community as diverse as Vickery Meadow, Dallas Texas service often brings many hands together to meet real needs. Volunteers, families, educators, and neighbors each contribute in their own way, creating support systems that help children grow with confidence and families feel welcomed. I have seen how one person’s commitment can create lasting change, not only for a student learning a new language, but for an entire family building a new life.

Service is a selfless act that gives hope and inspires others to do the same. Its impact reaches far beyond the moment it is given. Kindness, time, and compassion are often passed forward to everyone they touch. That is the culture of service I have seen in Dallas: people lifting one another up and creating stronger communities through everyday acts of care.

~Christelle Agasaro- Community & Family Engagement Coordinator @ Heart House Dallas, TX

I have worked as a volunteer in a major hospital in Michigan, in hospice and other areas of healthcare and grief support. I share my knowledge, experience, and values; I have connected with patients and their families with love and purpose, providing genuine care supported by my knowledge. But through all of this, I came to understand that: “We are people caring for other people.”

I realized that they also helped me. They shared their stories, anxieties, and ways of coping.

The patients, with their unique stories, and their families filled me with love, and I gave that love back to them. With my different accent and different culture, we still shared something in common: a language called love.

Thank you to all the patients I have helped in hospitals and hospice care—you made a difference in my process of adaptation. I hope I made a difference in your lives as well. A gesture of kindness and active listening is also care.

~Helena, from Henryville, PA

Hi all! My name is Shayna Canty, I’m 27, based out of the Pocono Mountains, and I’m a former AmeriCorps VISTA (aka Volunteer in Service to America). I served as a Volunteer Coordinator for a food insecurity nonprofit in Scranton, PA called Friends of the Poor from August 2019 to August 2020 (aka COVID-19).

While I was in school, I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to help people but I didn’t know how I wanted to do that. Thanks AmeriCorps, I found my answer!

During my service, I learned many skills, which I still utilize to this day, such as programming development and intergenerational approaches to conflict. Post-VISTA service, I’ve established a career as a nonprofit communications specialist, two Governor appointed commissioner, one time nationally appointed chair as my Selective Service chairperson (the youngest chair) and a national service influencer through Service Year Alliance (Alums Amplified).