Picture a young student opening a carefully wrapped package, pulling back the tissue paper to reveal neatly sharpened pencils tied with ribbon, a notebook with fresh pages, colorful stickers, and an inspirational note. Every item has been thoughtfully curated, cut, cleaned, resharpened, and packaged with intention. This isn’t a birthday or holiday present. Instead, it’s a school supply kit made from reclaimed materials and refurbished supplies—a reminder that someone believes in your education and success. This is the work of The Rewrite It Project, a student-led 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded and co-led by Sareena Shah ‘27, a Human Biology major and Education minor. What started as a pandemic-era response to educational inequities in her hometown has grown into a citywide movement, proving that the most powerful solutions often come from recognizing what we already have and getting it into the right hands.
Shah grew up in Chicago, attending what she recalled as one of the few integrated high schools in a highly segregated district. Her school’s tiered admissions program attracted students from every socioeconomic background. But this integration, combined with her work on her Local School Council and as a Chicago Public School student representative at the Illinois State Board of Education, also meant the stark educational inequities became impossible to ignore. “Some students walked five minutes to school while others were commuting two hours every morning, waking up at 5am to take multiple buses and trains,” Shah recalled. She witnessed 50% faculty turnover, two teacher strikes, and three different principal administrations. Add the pandemic, and it was clear that countless students were getting lost in the system’s turbulence.
Shah also saw inequity in her time spent in the Devon Street community, a multi-immigrant enclave with large South Asian and refugee populations. Through conversations with residents, shopkeepers, and families in this neighborhood, she gained a deeper understanding of the pandemic’s effects. But awareness and understanding weren’t enough. At the height of the pandemic, with people isolated in their own bubbles, Shah shared that she yearned for a way to foster a sense of connection and help students feel empowered to influence their broader educational system from their homes.
“The problem isn’t really a production problem, it’s a distribution problem,” she explained. “Across all the students in Chicago Public Schools, there are educational resources that we can leverage. It is simply about funnelling them into the hands of people who need these resources.”
This philosophy became the foundation of The Rewrite It Project, founded in August of 2020 with three of her friends. The model is simple: collect secondhand school supplies that might otherwise be discarded, refurbish them, and distribute them to students who need them most. To ensure these packages aren’t received like hand-me-downs, Shah, her co-founders, and student volunteers work together to cut around usable stickers, tear out used notebook pages, resharpen used pencils and crayons, and put them together using ribbon and wrapping paper. “When students receive these packages, I want them to feel like a gift,” she said. “We want them to know that there is a community of people who care about their educational success.” They have since implemented a citywide volunteer program and invited students and organizations, such as public libraries and churches, to participate in donation collecting, sorting, refurbishing, or redistributing resources.
Since its inception, The Rewrite It Project has evolved from the four cofounders to an executive team of current Chicago high school students and a Board of Directors providing strategic guidance. Today, eight high schools host Rewrite It chapters, each with their own student leadership teams managing outreach, collections, refurbishing, and local distribution. This reflects both the organization’s growth and its core mission of high schoolers empowering other high schoolers. The numbers speak for themselves. 16,500 students have been served, over 200 volunteers mobilized, and Shah and her team have partnered with more than 30 organizations, including corporations like Deloitte. The goal is to establish chapters in 50 Chicago public high schools in the next three years to deepen roots and build stable resources for these communities. “Chicago has so much need that we haven’t addressed fully yet,” Shah explained.
Connecting it to her studies in Human Biology, Shah shared that the Rewrite it Project ignited her love for school-based work. She came to Stanford wanting to be at the intersection of education, health, and helping others, making HumBio a natural fit to pursue these passions. As a pre-med student, Shah notes that her work and studies have shown her just how multifaceted human development really is. "We have to care for child and adolescent development, and the environment one is raised in, and partner that with their personal physiology, and all these social determinants of health, including education. I love having so many angles to look at human development from, which I would not have been able to do if it were not for the HumBio program." HumBio, she emphasized, is her “why Stanford?” Not just what brought her to Stanford but also what keeps her engaged, inspired, and wanting to give back every day.
On campus, Shah also works in the eating disorder prevention space with Dr. Eric Stice. She is always thinking about how she can continue to get these efforts into school settings and has first-authored a paper on increasing prevention intervention in high schools, colleges, and universities. This interest in bringing healthcare to schools is largely motivated by the experiences she’s gained through the Rewrite It Project. In both cases, she uses the same approach of thinking about how existing tools and infrastructure can be leveraged for those who would benefit.
Looking ahead, Shah’s goals for the future are clear—“I want to dedicate the rest of my life to that space at the intersection of health and education. I don't think we can separate them.” She hopes to return to Chicago, bringing her Stanford education back to the community that shaped her. “Schools catch a very, very large percentage of our future working population,” Shah said. “We can use them as vehicles to increase health education, to integrate prevention, to work on mental health, and to bring kids the resources they need to believe that their education matters."
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To learn more about The Re-Write It Project or get involved, visit The Re-Write It Project website.