Students came up with so many good ideas for solving problems in Loudoun County, Virginia, this year that the judges in the annual Step Up Loudoun Youth Competition couldn’t pick only one grand prize winner.
The iloom – Returns to Work and Resi-lution teams finished the final round of competition with identical high scores, earning $1,000 apiece to support their projects. The contest, run by Loudoun Youth, Inc. and Loudoun County Parks, Recreation and Community Services, challenges teens to identify community problems and implement innovative solutions. The YouthQuest Foundation has been the prize money sponsor every year since 2012.
Step Up “taught us the power of compassion,” Sahana Arumani said as she explained iloom to a panel of judges that included YouthQuest Director of Instruction Tom Meeks on April 11.
The project she created along with Shreya Arun, Abhinav Babu and Pranav Babu mobilizes manufacturers, online retailers and volunteers to address community needs with returned merchandise. They established a nonprofit organization that now has chapters in four states, where businesses send returned items, which are then sent to charities or sold for cash that is donated to charities.
Step Up competitors approach problems with a combination of the latest technology and social networking, along with old-fashioned deal-making skills and dedication to their community. Persistence helps, too.
Lacey Tanner, a senior at Rock Ridge High School, who launched a Step Up project to clean up Beaverdam Creek Reservoir, was one of the 10 finalists two years ago. This year, she shared the first-place prize with Carter Casagrande, Annabelle Monte, Ava Turicchi and Joe Waxvik – Brambleton Middle School students she has trained to take over the project when she goes away to college. Their Resi-lution team is organizing trash pick-up events in the 1,000-acre park and raising money for a shed to store cleanup equipment in preparation for the reservoir reopening to the public after being drained for repairs.
Academy of Engineering and Technology student Sanjitha Prabakaran took home the $500 third-place award for STEM for Scouts. Her project encourages Girl Scouts to pursue studies in science, technology, engineering and math through camps, classes and instructional videos.
Each of the other teams that reached the finals earned $250.
More than 200 students representing two dozen schools made presentations to judges in the preliminary round of this year’s Step Up competition on March 28 at Loudoun County Public Schools headquarters in Ashburn. Those 65 teams were narrowed down to the top 10, who competed in the finals on April 11 at the Brambleton Library.
Before announcing the winners, Loudoun Youth President and CEO Jared Melvin noted there were lots of familiar faces among the finalists. The Bridges team, which works to make sure students whose first language isn’t English feel included in activities at Park View High School, and COBRA, which educates people about healthy alternatives to cancer-causing foods, were among the Top 10 in 2018. So was Ari Dixit. In response to the overwhelming caseload school guidance counselors in the county face, he developed StudentCounselor, a voice-interface app. Last year, Ari won third prize for a similar project to help immigrants prepare for the U.S. citizenship test.
The results of the Step Up Loudoun Youth Competition has been so positive since it began in 2004 that the organizers are preparing to challenge the other largest school systems in the nation to step up with similar programs of their own to solve community problems.
