Hey! I am Bella Manes and I am a 16 year old from California. The summer of 2020 is a very important summer volunteering wise because I am about to be a junior and I want to be more invested in my community and it also happens to look good on college applications. At the beginning of summer I was beginning to look for opportunities, but was mainly focused on having fun. I later began to get in a bit of trouble for this, so I decided to put more effort into finding volunteer work. I searched and searched for local organizations that needed help, and I came out with basically nothing. Everything was either closed due to COVID or had already been filled up by other volunteers that beat me to it. At this point, I was pretty upset, not only had I tried to find volunteer opportunities and found nothing, but I was getting in trouble because I found nothing. This was when my dad and I came up with the idea to create my own volunteer work and create volunteer work for others in a situation similar to mine. We combined my passions of protesting for BLM and marching in the Women's march with volunteering, and that is how BlueYouth was born.