Growing up in Hawaii, I saw firsthand the chronic problems we had in what is thought to be paradise. Despite Hawaii being beautiful, many local families can’t stay. The term “Priced out of Paradise” is a thing too many face where they can no longer afford to stay on the islands. Social problems like these trickle down to the youth and the classrooms where many of my peers didn’t see the purpose to further their education and goals as college would be expensive. Along with these problems within the community, the natural environment is also at a tipping point with ocean pollution and micro plastics littering our beaches, something that was not the case less than half a decade ago. Seeing these things happening around me, that was my aha moment. My chance to create a change, to create a sustainable system that even kids can spearhead, to bring actionable solutions to these problems in my community and to the world. Bottles4College was created for the people as an immediately actionable solution to bring environmental and economical sustainability and has now led to the start of the fruition of my idea to be able to help the future generations of our community and to be able to give back to the Earth.

Bottles4College focuses on creating actionable solutions to social problems we see not only in Hawaii, but globally. These issues include environmental awareness, accessibility to higher education, decrease in educational interest, environmental and economic sustainability within communities, student empowerment, and much more as our platform is set up to be able to uplift the students and the community we are in. This can be credited to our 4 Pillars, topics that we commit to be able to help improve being Education, Environment, Community, and Lifestyle. These issues are important to tackle because the future of our local and global community relies on whether or not solutions are found for these issues. As a student who has been in the public school system, I found the sharp decline in students wanting to learn concerning as I loved to learn. This educational un-interest can spiral into students now having struggles graduating high school, getting into college, and then being able to get good jobs and being able to be a positive part of their community. Bottles4College is my way of being able to work towards full stability and sustainability within my community and the world.

Many programs have been able to work to cater towards a singular issue or idea. Bottles4College focuses on multiple. Bottles4College has built a college scholarship program fully funded through environmental efforts. This has allowed us to not only bring environmental awareness to our community we have grown grassroots connection with, but has also allowed us to bring recycling & help further sustainability with each of the 30+ partnerships we have and the multiple events and movie sites we work with as well including; Kualoa Ranch, Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, Outrigger Hotels, Honolulu Marathon, Sunset Surf Competition, Hawaii DOE (and multiple schools), Hawaii Children & Youth Day, Windward Mall, & many more. Through our work & with our partnerships, Bottles4College has also been able to give students the opportunity to have exclusive access to being behind the scenes to create their own events for Bottles4College, being a part of our teams for many of our events, & much more. This has allowed us to be able to give inspiration to many youth & adults alike in the community to help uplift the environment & those around us. 

I personally recycle 15,000 cans and bottles, so on top of our partnerships & events, it has allowed us to give out 20k college scholarships this year & at least 20k more for co2024 students. These collective efforts is how we fight the problems we see.

This nonprofit was set up through a path of long term work. During the pandemic, I started up the first ever Bottles4College Public Drop Off Depot at King Intermediate, the middle school I just started 7th grade at. This, along with starting another depot at the KualoaGrown Market at Kualoa Ranch, was the true start of Bottles4College and our path to creating college scholarships through recycling. We were able to grow incredibly through sharing our mission and showing the vision I had for Bottles4College, establishing many of our partnerships. We would then be able to get our official 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in March of 2021, further strengthening the foundation of Bottles4College to where we are now.

The key to our success has been identifying actionable solutions and taking each step at a time. Our first goal was to hit 1,000,000 cans and bottles recycled. Honestly, it at times felt like a far-fetched goal. But I focused on each can and bottle, each event, and each partnership and it took diligent consistent work. And well before my original projection, we were able to celebrate our 1 MILLION cans and bottles recycling drive February of 2023. This escalated our ability to fund our very first set of scholarships. That too, I originally hoped to give out bigger funding at a time, but we decided on 2 $10,000 scholarships and 3 $500 scholarships to have the same for 2024.

Bottles4College has been able to accumulate thousands of donations in cans and bottles and many dedicated supporters in our community. This includes individuals, businesses, events, legislative figures, local and global news, schools, and more in our community. I find this to be one of the biggest ways Bottles4College has been able to inspire others, by instilling our mission and goals within those around us to be able to not only uplift the organization, but everyone who is a part of it. This has resulted in a large following of the organization and an inspiring collective effort currently being pushed forward for Bottles4College, allowing us to be able to work on the actionable solutions to the social problems we see in our community better the environment, education, and the people of Hawaii and soon, the world. We have been able to inspire whole classes, resulting in many student bodies creating recycling drives for Bottles4College and learning about recycling and the environment. These students bodies are a part of schools ranging from k-12 and even college students including those from Kailua High School, Lunalilo Elementary, Niu Valley Middle, Campbell High, and more. Our scholarships has also opened the door to college for our recipients, giving them inspiration to pursue their academics and passions.