Hands On Tokyo Youth Impact Project

With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting everyday life, we hope you and your loved ones are in good spirits and health.

Given the unprecedented situation, where it has been difficult to hold in-person activities, Hands On Tokyo is striving to serve our community as best as we can. We are grateful for your continuous support to help us continue addressing the needs of our community amid the COVID-19 pandemic. With your support, we will continue to create innovative projects and provide services to help our community transition to “New-Normal” with and beyond COVID-19 crisis. None of our services would have been possible without your commitment and trust towards our organization. We are extremely grateful to have your support through this platform to innovate different types of services to meet the needs of our community. 

Since our last report we have developed several youth- led virtual and other projects. We have discussions with high school and college students on a regular basis to explore innovative ideas to promote volunteerism and encourage our youth leaders to continue serving for the community during these unprecedented times.

Among many of our Youth led activities, we would like to highlight this project that was planned and executed by several high school leaders from our Youth Impact Program. This project started as a voice of one high schooler -- “Is there anything we can do to help homeless people?” Apparently, he used to walk through this one homeless person everyday while going to school. He always thought about helping or wanting to make a difference but never could really give a pitch to this. However, things started to move forward once he took action and shared his feeling that he wanted to find a way to help people experiencing homelessness to fellow youth leaders in his school. His idea was discussed in high-school leaders' meetings and most of the high school leaders agreed to support and lead this project at their respective schools. This was the beginning of the “Helping the people experiencing Homelessness” project that our high school leaders launched under the leadership of the high schooler who proposed the idea.

They held a weekly online meeting to discuss the project planning and started researching organizations that support people experiencing homelessness to identify their next step. A shared document was created to divide the workload, track progress amongst themselves and to identify how they could actively engage other volunteers from their school on this project.

First of all, each member of the group was assigned to one of the organizations to contact and gather details to identify specific needs. The High school leaders reached out to the respective organizations and researched on specific items of their need. To their surprise, each organization had specific requests; some wanted summer clothes for the upcoming season but no food, while others had lists of specific food items. Once they had gathered all the necessary information, they all agreed to choose two organizations from the list to support through their project.

As a next step, leaders sorted the lists of items that they were going to collect at each school. Among five schools who agreed to engage in the project, three decided to hold a drive and the other two held a fundraiser activity to purchase the items that were difficult to collect through the drives. The planning and approval process took over a few weeks as they had to get approval for their initiative at the respective authority at their schools. Finally, the leaders decided a time-frame to start a drive and fixed a date to hold their fundraiser activity. Overall, they raised enough funds to purchase specific clothes items (140 undergarments and 150 pairs of socks) and also collected over 600 disposable masks, over 80 sets of canned and dried foods that could be stored longer before the items get distributed to the people experiencing homelessness. 

Here are a couple comments and voices from the youth leaders who were involved in this project:

“The drive for the homeless community overall astonished me. To be honest, after the idea was first suggested, I thought that it would be difficult for teens like us to succeed in a project like this. However, things moved forward so fast and the project was a success. It made me realize how us youths are capable of making a change. I am really looking forward to the many projects we have to come up with in the future!” – Youth Leader

“Our school’s responsibility was to collect masks and to raise money by hosting a water balloon fundraising event at school. This was the first time a game like this was held at school, and my co-leader and I had to go through a lot of challenges and preparation in order for our event to be successful. Some of the challenges we had to overcome were having to change the date of the event several times due to other events happening at the same time, and the preparation that came along with making this event a successful one. From this experience, we learned how hard the behind-the-scenes work is and the amount of time it takes to complete just one event. In the end, we were able to collect around 400 masks, successfully finish our water balloon fundraising event, and receive many positive feedback from students and teachers asking us to do it again once school starts in August.” - Youth Leader

“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our typical HoT activities were cancelled due to government sanctions, difficulties in communications, and restrictions with person to person contact. Despite these setbacks, the HoT high school division persevered to make an impact and it is an honor to be part of the team that rose through these challenges to directly impact the homeless in Tokyo. This was a project that we worked from scratch, from brainstorming to researching to calling the organization itself. We were able to raise funds and donations for clothes (particularly underclothes which are hardly given to the homeless) food, and support. Not only was it rewarding to truly be able to raise food and clothes for the homeless, but also have the opportunity to connect with dedicated, passionate, and genuinely good people in Tokyo.”- Youth Leader 

Hands On Tokyo’s Youth Impact Program guides the youth leaders to design, plan and execute their own program. This project is a great example of the process where youth leaders took all the initiatives on program planning and execution with the guidance of Hands On Tokyo’s staff. Starting a project from an idea and following up the program planning process along with execution, by learning this inevitable program development process, the young leaders learnt both hardship and accomplishment in completing a project. We believe the cycle of “learning through ideas as an ‘input’ and taking an action as an ‘output’” will make a great difference in people involved and impacted through the process. The youth members continue to learn through this process and ultimately advocate as a leader for the cause they care for, which eventually makes a difference in our society.

Our youth leaders are able to complete and learn through these cycles to accomplish our mission. All of the work we do would not be possible without the support from you, our donors. Through your generosity we will empower even more of the youth, and together continue to make a difference in our community!

The Covid-19 pandemic and related uncertainty have changed many things in our lives; however, we are quickly adapting to sustain and continue our services to the community in need. Thank you for your continued support and trusting our organization to keep striving through the tough times together with our community.  

We wish for everyone's safety and health during this unprecedented situation.

Please stay safe!