MedKit Mission founder Aniket Chintapalli (second from right), two members of his organization and Mayor Dave Fleisher discuss where to hold future drives to provide medical kits to the homeless.
Community service clubs and organizations are common high-school extracurricular activities, and while they’re often found in educational environments, they can also be offshoots of outside national or local groups.
This is what makes MedKit Mission – a service organization started by East High School student Aniket Chintapalli – so unique. The senior first got the idea last summer while he spent time in Philadelphia.
“I was kind of near the 8th Street area,” he recalled, “and I saw a difference between how there were a lot of hospitals around the area, but there was still a lot of homeless people who really don’t have the best access to basic medical needs, such as bandages, hand sanitizer and everything.”
The disparity led Chintapalli to start a drive for basic medical supplies at the Cherry Hill library that would then be handed out to homeless people in Philadelphia.
“In Cherry Hill, at least our area in Cherry Hill, we do have a very privileged life here,” Chintapalli acknowledged. “So it felt like a way we could give back.”
That first MedKit Mission drive netted $200 worth of medical supplies that were distributed to shelters in the Camden area at the request of Volunteers of America Delaware Valley (VOADV). The organization runs seven homeless shelters that have benefitted from MedKit donations.
The group also got a donation from the Philadelphia Union soccer team of about $1,900 in medical supplies, including large quantities of KN95 masks.
“We’re partnering with shelters in the Philly area to help distribute the masks,” Chintapalli said.
While the work of collecting donations and packing the kits is done by township high-school students, MedKit Mission is an independent outside entity not affiliated with the schools or the district. It also does educational work through its social media, focusing on information about public health and the nation’s homelessness epidemic that is specifically aimed at those in high school.
MedKit Mission’s Instagram page is full of infographics with statistics on drug abuse, the stigma surrounding some health care and challenges faced by the homeless. It has also started a new program called the Speak Up Challenge that addresses the biggest public health concerns of high-schoolers and relays them to local officials.
Most of the work done by MedKit Mission is organized and completed throughout the course of the school year, with the summer months used for planning and networking with other service organizations. In the upcoming year, it hopes to expand to more neighboring communities, including another chapter Chintapalli wants to start in Marlton.
“Our entire focus has been in Cherry Hill … but we do want to expand to different towns,” he noted, “along with getting more exposure to different people in different areas, and also (to) give kids more leadership experiences.”
Chintapalli emphasized that anyone can get involved in his work by making donations.
“Our student volunteers really just help us out with packaging our kits,” he pointed out, “but any physical donations, like basic medical supplies, would be helpful at one of our drives, which are gonna start coming up soon, as the school year starts.”
