Team
Where the Passion Begins
Vari Patel
Legislation
I decided to create a legislation specifically because my love for policymaking stepped in. Growing up I heard numerous stories about how parents smoke and use harmful substances in cars with their children. Most of the time these children don't want the adult to use these substances but they don't have a voice to say no. I decided to take that challenge I see many of my peers struggle with and use it as an inspiration and work alongside my group to creating legislation that ensures all minors are in smoke-free vehicles at all times. Something that I have learned is that age doesn't matter in how big of a change you can make as an individual. It is beyond crazy to see the amount of change my age group can make and so I would tell any teen that has a willingness to create impactful change, they should definitely act upon it. I am loving what we are doing right now and I definitely want to have a future surrounded around health and policymaking.
Leila Pedreros
Social Media
For years now, I’ve found projects and ways to help others. Startland’s Social Change Internship has made me able to help people I hadn’t thought I would be able to before. I’ve seen the problem of substances and products with tobacco or nicotine from my peers, students, and friends around me. This legislation is something that can help not just kids who need it but prevent dependencies and addictions from developing at later ages. I’m proud to be involved in this and to be making a difference for my community.
Zara Jamshed
Public Relations
One of the things that makes her very sad is how people either don't believe in the health effects of smoking or they don't think of it as a serious thing. There are plenty of people like her in Kansas and Missouri who've developed other diseases or had their lives affected by smoking which causes them the same pain she goes through. You don't always have the power to tell someone to stop, even if you have health complications, like asthma, that make it really bad for you. With this bill, it's important to understand that we are protecting the health of those who cannot tell others to stop, and we're protecting them from smoking being normalized in youth.
Matthew Nunez
Research
For me, this idea started out as an easy way to get through AP psychology. My school offers a program that allows you to change an entire course into one big project. So I thought and thought until I decided on an issue that deeply bothers me, that being second-hand smoke. So I wrote up a whole literature review on this topic and then I was presented by my teacher with an idea. An internship over social change that I could use to keep my idea going. I was paired with a like-minded group of people, and the idea just continued to grow.
Our History
Student advocates of the Greater Kansas City Area
As a team, if we had to make any statement on leadership it would be to go all in or don't start. At the very beginning when we had proposed an idea of creating legislation we definitely did not get a positive response and it put us a bit of a difficult spot. But as a group, we made a decision that no matter how hard this fight will be, we will make this change. This movement was ultimately a collaboration of work and ideas all four of us put together. Leila's love for design helped us create this website really quickly and she's been gathering a lot of research. She's also been reaching out to her school. Matthew has been great at reaching out to others and he actually came up with the initial idea to focus on secondhand smoking. This topic actually came from the coursework in his class so who knew that decision would end up leading us here! Vari's love and interest in policymaking allowed us to create a bill. She's the one to go to if you have questions about policymaking in the states of Kansas and Missouri and she's been instrumental in reaching out to city councils. Zara gathered most of the initial research on this topic and she's been very useful in reaching out to health organizations, city councils, students, etc. We all worked very hard to reach out to as many people as we could and without those connections, we would have never been able to reach this far. We all four are really lucky. We consider it a blessing that our team consists of one another. The way that we all compliment each other really allowed our team to come out top and gain all of this momentum we have so far.