Smidge

By Maxwell Rothman

During 2020, the world ground to a halt as a result of a global pandemic. My school went completely asynchronous. I couldn’t see my friends, and I seldom left the house. While this experience was not ideal, it prompted me to think more about the needs of others. While I was at home, I was watching the news a lot, and I saw how much others were suffering. They were getting sick, dying, losing loved ones, losing jobs, and there was a general sense of unrest and fear. I realized that my temporary issues of not seeing friends and cancelled summer camps were nothing compared to the hardships of many people. 

“What do you boys think of the pandemic?” my dad asked as he paused the TV.

“It’s pretty bad,” my brother said. I nodded.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, “Is there something Pepper and I can do to help people?”

“Sure, what do you want to do?” Dad asked. “Do you want to do a summer camp, since you are missing yours?”

“Teach it?” my brother asked, and we looked at each other then back at dad.

“Why not? Just teach about something you know and like.”

So my younger brother and I created and taught a summer class that used Legos to teach basic engineering principles with a local education oriented nonprofit called Peninsula Bridge. We successfully presented the idea to the Peninsula Bridge administration and developed the five-day curriculum for the camp. 

My brother and I taught daily hour-long classes to rising fourth graders over Zoom. We had a different challenge every day to explore different engineering principles. In one challenge we taught the kids about weight distribution and then had them use their Legos to design and build a bridge or platform to support as much weight as possible. At the end of the build time everyone tested their design to see how much weight it could support. 

The camp went great. The Peninsula Bridge executive director, teachers, and students were all very excited about the program and asked us if we could do another class again the next summer. So, for the following summer, we decided to teach a more complicated class. And one we were even more excited about than the first. This one would be on remote controlled cars. But these aren’t the RC cars most people think of though. They are for adult hobbyists. 

My brother and I became very passionate about RC cars during the pandemic and bonded over them. We spent countless hours driving them at our local park and on our street, and we fixed and modified them in our garage. My favorite car is my blue Traxxas Unlimited Desert Racer (commonly known as the UDR). It goes 45 miles per hour and has a built-in roll cage and LED lights. It makes a loud and deep electric whir while driving, and when it’s going slow the spur and pinion gears make a clanking noise not unlike that of a tank’s treads.  

We decided to teach another week-long summer camp, this time on how to build a simple RC car kit to rising sixth and seventh graders because of how much fun we had working on our RC cars. We created a curriculum that included me making a 70-page manual on how to build the car and my brother shot a short video series that also walked through the build. This camp was also a lot more difficult to teach because the subject matter was more complicated. The students also had lots of questions and needed a lot of help. This experience taught me a lot about teaching.  

I loved helping people through my Peninsula Bridge classes, but I realized that it is way too hard for me as a middle school student to volunteer to help my community. This is why I started my own charity called Smidge. Smidge’s mission is to make it easy to volunteer. It pairs people, with a focus on middle school and high school students, who want to volunteer with local non-profits. But it is very hard to get non-profits to partner with another charity that is so young. 

To get the two partners I have, I cold-emailed more than a dozen charities and most didn’t even reply to me. The first charity, Peninsula Bridge, I was able to convince because I had already worked with them. So it was a big deal when the Jewish Coalition for Literacy was willing to talk to me and then after multiple calls agreed to partner with me. What is important about the Jewish Coalition for Literacy is that it proved Smidge would work. What I realized was that once a charity would partner with me, before I had a website, before I had incorporated, when I was just a teenager with an idea and a charity name, that it was the right idea. I surmised that the snowball theory would apply to my charity and that every charity that worked with me would add credibility for getting the next one.

Another challenge I face is getting access to volunteers. I have gotten volunteers by advertising the opportunities my partners push to me on NextDoor. Through this method, Smidge has matched over 100 volunteer hours so far between my partners. But I want to reach more people than I can through NextDoor, so I am working on a website with a volunteer developer named Daniel and a volunteer artist named Dean.  The website will be a marketplace for volunteer opportunities. It will match volunteers with local non-profits and will provide clear time commitments for the opportunity. My goal is to expand Smidge across the country and have 1,000,000 volunteer hours matched by the end of high school. I am very thankful for all the help Daniel, Dean and my dad have given to me. It makes me optimistic Smidge will work.