Today we’d like to introduce you to Ishaan and Avi Cheng-Patel.
Hi Ishaan and Avi, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Thank you VoyageDallas for this opportunity to update on what we’ve been doing since we established our nonprofit Under My Umbrella in October 2022. We are excited to have this opportunity to highlight our efforts over the last 4 months.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Our motto is: Through struggle comes strength and a responsibility. There have definitely been struggles, so we have been learning, adapting, and adjusting. We struggle with things such as lack of space to store donations and being able to balance our outreach with schoolwork. Our living room is our operations headquarters so sometimes you may have to step around boxes to get to the hallway. Sometimes if we have a lot of homework, we are up late to finish work after our distributions since we are usually stuck in traffic for hours. But we want to do distributions during the weekdays when we know there are gaps to fill since not many people go out on the weekdays versus the weekends. Every other week, our mom goes during school hours on her day off and we all go the next week after school. It isn’t easy, but we make it work. And it’s basically part of the routine for us now. Our mom says that if we make outreach a part of our routine, it becomes as automatic as brushing your teeth or going to the gym.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
In the last 4 months, we have continued to serve 50-100 of our unsheltered neighbors each week with hot meals, hygiene, clothing, and other essential supplies. We have shared resources with other nonprofits to get supplies where they are needed as soon as possible which includes over 1500 pieces of clothing, over 2000 pantry item supplies, toys for the holidays, and other in-kind donations. We have attended other events so that we can learn what we can do to best help those efforts. We have opened our first “pop-up pantry” from our living room open to anyone in need. Our 8th annual holiday outreach was a huge success, and we were able to provide mini trees or menorahs to 62 families, individuals, and seniors. We even participated in our first festival where we could share information about our organization. We shared our table with voter registration and Be The Match volunteers because those are important causes too. We believe that everyone can help so we try to find ways for everyone who wants to help to do that. People can donate money, drop off donations on our porch, help us collect plasticware, list Under My Umbrella as their charity for corporate matching programs or Kroger reward card programs and things like that and we are always open to suggestions on how people can help. We want to show how working together as a community can expand our “umbrella” to cover more people in need.
“It is important to give back to the community because you never know what someone is going through. You can learn from them, and they can learn from you.” (Ishaan, 10th grade)
“When I can give food to someone, it makes me happy. It is important to help people. I want to see people happy.” (Avi, 7th grade)
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Christina (mom to Ish and Avi): We believe that hard work, consistency, and mutual respect has formed the foundation for Under My Umbrella. We say that it is indeed hard work but it is most definitely “heart work.” It is us talking to people, hearing their stories, spending time with them, and asking them how we can help and what exactly they need that would be helpful. That’s the empathy in action. There is a connection that is made and mutual respect that is shared. We have also been intentional in finding various ways for everyone in our community to get involved in any capacity they wish and are able and we think that is key. Everyone can help in some way, sometimes we just have to figure out how they can best help. We have also been honored to be well received by established NPOs that we admire so much who have helped guide us and mentor us. We are grateful for our various partners that include girl scout troops, other nonprofits, church groups, business groups, families, individuals, youth sports groups, etc. It has been amazing to see just about every aspect of our community come together to help those in need because that’s the driving force behind UMU…just us watching out for each other and covering each other. As far as luck, it is the Year of the Rabbit in the Lunar calendar so we hope that we are lucky enough to be able to continue our efforts to help those in need.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.under-my-umbrella.org
- Facebook: UnderMyUmbrellaDFW
- Email: UnderMyUmbrellaDFW@gmail.com
