Projects
4/18 YOUTH LEADERSHIP SUMMIT FINALISTS
We are so grateful to have been invited to present at the 2026 Youth Leadership Summit, and are honored to have received the award of Top 10 Finalist. This summit was an amazing place to learn about what other students our age are doing for their community. We did a lot of networking, and afterwards we left with an extensive plan of ways to expand our reach! In the future, we are looking forward to working with some of the other NGOs we met at the summit, expanding to multiple charters, applying for grants, and more!
3/17-18 POETRY WRITING WORKSHOPS
We were invited to the Grace Church Lower School to host three writing workshops on the haiku with Grace second-graders. Eight of our volunteers worked across two days to present, instruct, and support the students as they crafted their own poems based on images of their choice. Our workshops were structured as the following: 10 minute lesson, 30 minute writing, and 10 minute read aloud. The students were so passionate about writing, and many of them wrote haikus about more than one image! We got a lot of comments around the realm of “Wow! This is so much more fun than what we normally do!” which was amazing because we actually got to see them develop a love for literacy in the very moment. We are looking forward to hosting more writing workshops at other schools around NYC in the future!
9/27 BOOK & BAKE SALE (Fall, 25)
On Saturday, we hosted our second Book & Bake Sale of the year — Fall themed! Our pumpkin baked goods and cozy-fall reads attracted hundreds of visitors, and we managed to raise almost double the amount of our first event!!! Now that we are a state-registered non profit, the donation to the New York Public Library will be made under the Pens Up name! We couldn’t have done it without the passionate volunteers that brought delicious baked goods and worked the stand all day. Their confidence and excitement encouraged strangers and familiar faces alike to stop by and treat themselves to a cookie or a book. We’re so excited for our Winter Book & Bake Sale, and have plans in the works for a reading and writing workshop at the Grace Church Lower School.
9/24 CLUB FAIR
Today’s Club Fair marked PENS UP’s birth as an official club of Grace Church High School! We got a ton of interest across grades, and even from faculty! We also announced our Saturday Book and Bake Sale to the whole school and handed out pocket sized flyers with the location and time. With over 50 student sign ups, we hope to see some familiar faces at our Saturday event!
5/26 BOOK & BAKE SALE (Spring, 25)
This Monday we hosted our first event: a Book and Bake Sale! With book donations from multiple locations, brand-new books from Simon and Schuster, and homemade baked goods, we managed to raise hundreds of dollars for the New York Public Library! We set up on the scenic corner of University and 8th, where our table caught the eye of New Yorkers and tourists alike. We sold over forty books, but with plenty left over, we plan on hosting another Book and Bake Sale and donating the rest to various organizations across the city. Thank you to everyone who stopped by to donate and/or browse!
5/11-5/25 BOOK DRIVE
Over two weeks, we collected nearly a hundred book donations from local residents across multiple locations. These books were sorted and sold in our Books and Bake Sale!