HIGHLIGHTS ON
OUR YOUNG LEADERS
OUR LEADERS.
Protect the Children has been traditionally led by young adult leaders, under the guidance of our Advisory Board and staff since its creation in 2015. Our nonprofit focuses on education in a variety of fields and these teenagers, educated in different schools and universities, are gathering their friends and schoolmates to share their energy, knowledge, empathy and fun spirits for the benefit of diverse communities. We would like to highlight the work of 3 young adults who highly committed to Protect-the-Children, thus making an impact on their own community:
Clarissa
Clarissa is a senior at Woodside Priory School, heading to Northwestern university in the fall of 2023. She loves technology and computer science (CS) and strives to use them to make a difference. She has been taking computer science courses both inside and outside of school. She received the CS award as a sophomore and has continued to take Algorithms, a post-AP CS course in school. In the summer, she explored data science by attending the Summer Immersion Program at Columbia University. Clarissa used her knowledge in STEM and coding to tutor an underserved student at Peninsula Bridge and developed a coding curriculum to teach elementary school students at a summer camp through the City of Los Altos.
Attending an all-girls middle school has raised her awareness of gender inequality and feminism. Her passions in technology and women’s rights have inspired her to participate in a Technovation Girls team in sophomore year. Her team of 4 created an app that connects volunteers with seniors who need help with daily tasks. The app was selected for the quarter-finals round. Leading the team in junior year, she hopes to design and create an app to pitch a solution for another real-world problem. Further, COVID has exacerbated the need to close the gender gap in educating girls and increase their earning power in professional jobs. She has recently founded a Girls Who Code club to promote sisterhood and enable gender parity of girls in STEM.
Besides technology, she is an avid musician playing both violin and piano. She has played in the Peninsula Youth Orchestra program for over 7 years and is the assistant principal second violinist of the senior Peninsula Youth Orchestra. She loves playing the violin in outreach concerts and community events. Clarissa obtained state honors and completed level 10 of the California Certificate of Merit Piano examination and has played piano accompaniment for the musical and chapel services at Woodside Priory. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, photography, writing, and video editing. She made a series of cooking videos for the City of Los Altos Virtual Recreation Center. She is also a co-editor of the Yearbook club in school.
Clarissa became in 2021 our Director of Computer Science curriculum.
Dalia
Dalia, a student at the University of Chicago, is our longest serving volunteer. She started volunteering for Protect the Children at age 10, and has continued since then. A skilled baker, Dalia has conducted many themed birthday parties where she was demonstrating how to decorate cupcakes or cakes, generating a lot of joy and excitement in the children. These fundraisers, coupled with others, funded the education of underserved children in Nepal and in the Bay Area, paying for tuitions, uniforms, transportation, books, stationary and electronic devices.
Dalia has travelled to Kathmandu, Nepal, to bring new materials to the children at Aishworya. She took this opportunity to teach English, play, and get to know the orphans really well.
As she matured, she took in charge the organization of the fundraisers and the relationships with our donors, generous individuals or companies. Among the donations of goods loved by the children were French story books offered by Gallimard, one of the main French publishers, and cupcakes from Sprinkle, given to the students attending our free summer camps in the Bay Area.
Passionate about languages, Dalia used her knowledge of four languages to develop two types of curricula under the guidance of a Professor at Stanford University: French for English speakers and French for Hispanic speakers. Recruiting French speakers, she taught, as well as trained tutors for the Recreation Department and all the elementary schools in the School District of Los Altos in the Bay Area, serving many elementary school children of different social conditions. When Covid hit, Dalia was the initiator of the project “My little French class in the backyard”, gathering children once a week outside to teach them French. This initiative was followed by at least two dozen more in the area, taught by our volunteers.
Dalia has also recruited high school tutors to develop an offer of summer camps for 2021, focusing on languages, coding and art. The success of these academic, but also fun camps was immediate, as children loved the mentorship of our teenagers led by Dalia! She became in 2020 the Director of Curricula and Partnerships, and of Language Curriculum.
Dalia has volunteered more than 500 hours during her high school years and received 3 community service awards, including two prestigious Gold medal for the President’s Volunteer Service Award.
Letizia
Letizia Pastore is a current senior at Los Gatos High School. She’s a food lover and athlete and combines both of her passions through her service to the community.
In the past few years, along with her job as a gymnastics coach, she has been working with Second Harvest as the Health Ambassador for underprivileged communities in the Bay Area. She’s currently an international representative for the “Zero Hunger” program for Teens4Unity, a project that aims to address food insecurities on a global level.
She has also led an independent research project on type II diabetes, a disease that affects underprivileged communities in particular due to specific eating habits.
In her conversation with author Casey Crosbie, who has worked as the lead dietitian for the LPC Hospital Comprehensive Care Program for Eating Disorders at Stanford, Letizia realized the importance of addressing this topic at an early stage which inspired her to envision an educational program for kids. In preparation for this ambitious initiative, she studied “Issues in Human Physiology: Diet and Exercise” through a class at UCLA.
As director of the Health and Wellbeing program within Protect the Children, she worked to develop videos and create events to bring a fun approach to every child to explore the joy of a balanced life that integrates movement and diet as part of the joy of living.
Letizia has spent more than 200 hours doing community service on Health and Wellbeing, and reached more than 400 people. She became in 2021 our Director of Health and Wellbeing Curriculum.
She has received community service awards, including the Gold medal for the President’s Volunteer Service Award.
