Shrusti Amula, right, with COO Vayun Amula, assemble emergency food packages at Rise N Shine, an organization that Shrusti founded to reduce food waste through composting and food-recovery.
This year is expected to be the hottest on record, but 18-year-old activist Shrusti Amula is refusing to feel down about the future of the planet. Instead, she’s working to reduce the impacts of climate change by encouraging her community to reduce food waste.
Amula is part of a new generation of climate youth activists starting their own nonprofits. At age 13, when most young people are figuring out how to navigate middle school, she started the Rise N Shine Foundation, which operates food-
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This year is expected to be the hottest on record, but 18-year-old activist Shrusti Amula is refusing to feel down about the future of the planet. Instead, she’s working to reduce the impacts of climate change by encouraging her community to reduce food waste.
Amula is part of a new generation of climate youth activists starting their own nonprofits. At age 13, when most young people are figuring out how to navigate middle school, she started the Rise N Shine Foundation, which operates food-waste reduction programs in Maryland’s largest school district. The organization has food-recovery and redistribution programs in 45 of Maryland’s Montgomery County 211 public schools and composting programs in 15 of them.
Although the nonprofit is only five years old, Amula has won funding from a substantial list of public and private supporters, including Allstate, the Maryland Department of Transportation, L’Oréal Paris, Maryland Environmental Trust, Mastercard, and Points of Light. Eventually, she aims to expand her program to all Montgomery County public schools.
Amula was inspired to create Rise N Shine after learning how much food waste contributes to climate change. About 30 to 40 percent of the U.S. food supply goes uneaten and eventually ends up in landfills or incinerated, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Transporting, handling, and landfilling wasted food generates carbon dioxide and methane gas emissions, the agency has said. These greenhouse gasses are the primary driver of climate change.
Paul Morigi, Getty Images for Points of Light
Shrusti Amula speaks onstage during the George H. W. Bush Points of Light Awards on October 23, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
In 2018, Amula competed in a national STEM competition with a project that explored the issue. She implemented a composting program at a small, local elementary school and analyzed how much waste was reduced.
“At the end of the four months, just seeing the significant results we were able to get and how much big waste we were able to divert, just showed me that it was a bigger issue than I initially thought,” she said.
“It really showed me that I needed to expand this.”
At that point, information technology company Leidos, which had helped fund her early work at the elementary school, advised Amula to set up a foundation, so other funders could help expand the project. Funding is split between grant and award money. This year, the foundation received about $65,000 from awards alone from organizations including George H.W. Bush Points of Light and AllState.
With this support, Rise N Shine reports that it has diverted more than nearly 206,000 pounds of food waste from landfills and distributed about 300,000 meals donated by local grocery stores and local businesses to homeless shelters and impoverished communities. Amula has kept operations lean with a small staff of seven volunteers. Now a freshman at Georgetown University, Amula is the eldest among the team and said she tries to mentor those coming behind her.
Amula’s work has been recognized locally, nationally, and internationally. L’Oréal named her one of its “women of worth” last year. She also has received the EPA’s President’s Environmental Youth Award and the George H.W. Bush Points of Light Award.
At that same time, Amula is exploring all that she can be. She is majoring in science, technology, and international affairs, practices classical Indian dance, and is a national-level cricket player. The Chronicle of Philanthropy spoke with Amula about what drives her and her nonprofit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your activism journey start?
Growing up, I think my parents instilled the values of giving back to our community. They’ve been through a lot in their lifetime and have had to face a lot of challenges.
What were some of those challenges?
My dad did not grow up with a lot of money. I’m just learning about the challenges that he faced in India. On the other hand, my mom did grow up with a lot of money. Her dad, my grandpa, was very, very big on giving back to his community, because he did not grow up with a lot of money. And then when my parents immigrated to the U.S., they did not have money. Now we’re fortunate enough to be in the position to give back, and that’s very important to them.
Running a foundation is challenging for anyone at any age. Can you talk about what you’ve learned as you’ve raised money and scaled up?
Grants are very hard to get. I think just by applying to a lot of grants we learned what [funders] are looking for. For our food-recovery programs, it was a bit easier; we don’t have to pay for those because they’re funded by our county. How it works is: The students have their trash and recycle bin, and we add an extra bin. There’s a green bin for the compost and the food scraps. All students have to do is put their food [there]. Much of the work we do for the food recovery program is talking to the county, and that honestly has been very hard. Getting in contact with people with power is very difficult, and holding these conversations and taking the time and really getting your point across is very difficult.
As a young activist and philanthropist, do you find it hard to get people to take you seriously?
Especially in the beginning, it was incredibly hard to try to get [school] principals to hear me out. But we reached out to a lot of schools, and we got lucky with one school. We were also reaching out to different politicians, setting up meetings with them. And we were able to get a meeting with a council member, and he wrote us a letter of support, which was incredibly helpful, and we were able to send that out to schools, which gave us more validation with the schools.
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What was your reaction to being honored at the Points of Light award ceremony in October alongside high-profile people like actor and philanthropist Patrick Dempsey?
One of the main messages I want to spread is that you can have a voice. I want to become an inspiration and mentor to younger generations and youth leaders who want to create change in their communities. Having these awards is incredibly important to me and my purpose, because it’s validation that there are people who are willing to listen to us.
How would you like to see your generation help progress conversations about climate change?
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially with the hurricanes in Florida. When I started this, even though it was not long ago, I didn’t see the impacts of climate change directly. I knew it was a looming problem, but I didn’t see it affecting our everyday lives. Now we’re able to see the extent so horribly in our society and in countries that are disproportionately affected by climate change. This is incredibly important to me and for a lot of the other youth leaders. The only problem that we see right now is that the older generation in power, they don’t see it as much as we do, because they’re not going to be as affected by this as we are. So I think to some extent, it is our responsibility to keep pushing for change.
Stephanie Beasley is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Philanthropy where she covers major donors and charitable giving trends. She was previously a global philanthropy reporter at Devex. Prior to that, she spent more than a decade as a policy reporter on Capitol Hill specializing in transportation, transportation security, and food and drug safety.