Two Carmel High School seniors were recently named Distinguished Finalists by the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards. The nationwide program honors young people for outstanding acts of volunteerism.
Armaan Goel founded Code for Change, a nonprofit that provides high school students with opportunities to volunteer in the tech field. One of the projects the group participated in was creating a digitized hall pass system.
“The hall pass was a paper-based system,” Goel said. “So, our goal was kind of to digitize that and make a mobile and web-based client that allows people to request passes, allows teachers to interface and for students to go in and out. We’re working on streamlining that process and making it more user-friendly.”
They also created a complaint registration system for the Indiana Civil Rights Commission.
“The system we created streamlines that and makes it easier for both the organization to deal with these complaints, but also makes it easier for people with complaints to register them,” Goel said.
Jonathan “Reece” Tofaute has spent the last 10 years teaching children with special needs to ice skate through Indy Twisters, a nonprofit hockey team his father founded.
“I started working with Indy Twisters when I was 7 years old,” Tofaute said. “It was a very, very surreal but rewarding experience, especially after getting to interact with some of the parents and having the opportunity to speak with them and hear their stories.”
Tofaute is humbled to be honored by doing something he felt he would have done, anyway.
“It’s really about the rewards you get when you get to see how happy the kids are made by what you’re doing,” he said. “I’m flattered to receive the award, but the point of what I was doing wasn’t to receive recognition.”
For more, spirit.prudential.com.
