Most high schoolers spent most of their quarantine days scrolling through social media and on Zoom calls with their friends. On the contrary, Klein students Aysha Ameerah, Nidhi Patel, Marissa Coveler, and Sophia Ayala were on Zoom calls with guest speakers and hard at work creating an Instagram page centered around global health concerns.

The Awareness Raisers, as the foursome calls themselves, hopes to use social media in a positive way to raise awareness of various current health issues. Through their website, awarenessraisers.wixsite.com/home, and their Instagram page, awarenessraisers101, the organization has impacted viewers worldwide.

“The goal of Awareness Raisers,” senior communications manager Marissa Coveler said, “is to give the community, mostly young adults, access to the knowledge of certain health conditions both mental and physical, so that they can educate themselves. It also helps with volunteering and learning how to help people in those situations.”

Even when the group was first creating blueprints for the organization, they knew that they wanted their primary audience to be teenagers. This was a key factor behind the decision to make the organization internet based, they said. 

“Teenagers are on social media more than anyone else, and because that was our targeted group, we thought that was the best way to go,” Coveler said. “It’s easier to spread information around over the internet than it is in person.”

With COVID-19 dominating news headlines, junior Awareness Raisers founder Aysha Ameerah said she personally felt called to start a way to use social media to inform her community of health issues that had been recently left in the dark.

“Since COVID-19, everyone’s attention has been on that certain issue,” said Ameerah. “I felt like because of that, other conditions were being left in the dark. We need people to be aware of different situations and different circumstances in order to support one another. Without knowing that, we can’t help.”

Along with covering the science behind the health issues that they cover, the Awareness Raisers hope to bring consciousness to the social changes that might result from those issues, especially those related to COVID-19.

“I feel like people need to be more aware of health issues specifically now, just because we’ve been out of a pandemic,” junior social media coordinator Sophia Ayala said. “Some people aren’t aware of the social problems that those health issues might cause and their long term effects on the community.”

Many members in the organization, like Ameerah, feel that their age gives them a leg up in running the organization. They aim to inform the future leaders of the world.

“With this organization, I feel like if one has the mindset, the commitment, and the drive to help people, anything is possible, even despite age,” Ameerah said. “At times, I do feel like I have a lot on my shoulders, especially as a student going to school, but I think that in the end, the impact the organization has and the effect it has on other people can allow me to keep pushing forward.”