W.H. teen connects teens with nonprofits

West Hempstead High School senior Kelly Ejnes is a parent’s dream. Well, apparently, she is the dream of both parents and teachers: the Nassau Region PTA awarded Ejnes its Youth Humanitarian Award last month for her efforts to help volunteers network.

Ejnes, 17, created the website www.civicvolunteer.com last year in an attempt to introduce aspiring volunteers to a multitude of local nonprofit organizations. But it’s far from her first community service project.

“Kelly has been doing fundraisers and food drives with the school’s Key Club since she was in ninth grade,” said her father, Walter Ejnes, who is a member of the West Hempstead Board of Education.

The Key Club, of which Ejnes is now president, is a community service group at West Hempstead High School that has served as a platform for students who wish to volunteer through programs set up at and run by the school. Shortly after the school district changed its open-campus policy to allow students off-campus lunch privileges in exchange of community service hours, more students began looking for volunteer opportunities and Ejnes saw a need to help them.

“Kelly really wanted to find a way for students to continue their community service outside the school and outside the Key Club,” her father said. “The only problem was, students were having a tough time finding a place they could go to volunteer.”

That’s when Ejnes got the idea to start a website that connected both the students and the organizations that need help. The result? A site that is encouraging in appearance and incredibly simple to maneuver.

“I’ve gotten emails from the organizations that post on the website telling me the how easy it is to use,” Ejnes recently told the Herald. “There’s no doubt that it’s working, and I think a simple site like this was necessary for local kids to get involved in their community.”

And civicvolunteer.com is adamant about working on a local level.

“Kelly will sometimes get posts on the site from other volunteer groups that are on a national scale,” her father said. “The site, though, is meant for local non-profits in the West Hempstead and Island Park community. She carefully monitors the site to make sure that all the groups that are posted are local and easily accessible for the volunteers.”

In addition to making the county’s entire PTA organization proud — and earning an award that was named in honor of the late Stanley Marcus, who is remembered for his philanthropic efforts and persistent volunteer work — Ejnes has made her friends and family members proud, too. “She’s met so many challenges along the way,” Walter Ejnes said, “but she never gave up.”

Ejnes, who is graduating this June, will continue her volunteer services when she goes to Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., for her freshman year as a psychology major this fall.

“I still have to find out what opportunities there will be for volunteer work,” she said. “But there’s no doubt that I will be continuing the site, as well as community service, when I go to college.”