South Bay student gets hands on with public health nonprofit

Seventeen-year-old Arun Mommileti was devoting his time to hand sanitization long before the COVID-19 pandemic. The senior at King’s Academy in Sunnyvale launched a nonprofit called United2Care in 2017 specifically to increase access to personal hygiene products around the world, and has quickly pivoted to tackling today’s public health challenges.

Arun’s global campaign began as a middle school project. His science teacher asked students to choose a social problem in the world to write about, but Arun struggled with what to pick—there were, as he points out, quite a few choices. He began to research and came across a few places that mentioned the importance of hand sanitization, and it piqued his interest. He said his dad had his own stories of growing up in a rural community in India, of how unsanitary the conditions were.

“So that inspired me to try to look into it, but since I was in seventh grade, I kind of said, ‘Oh, what can I do?’” Arun said. “But then when I went into ninth grade, I really got a passion for it and I wanted to see a difference, especially talking to some of my cousins in India.”

Arun’s parents helped him through the process of starting a nonprofit, which he said was very meticulous. Once the paperwork was done, his plan was to launch a few awareness projects to explain the importance of handwashing, “but when we launched this project, I really saw our potential and I wanted to expand,” he said.

Since then, United2Care has launched initiatives in India and Kenya, where they’ve distributed bars of soap and hygiene information to rural communities. Arun launched a United2Care club at his school, where he and his classmates have raised funds through carnivals, bake sales and online donation campaigns.

In 2019, Arun made the trip to Kenya himself. He went with Jordan International Aid to a medical relief camp, where he spoke with residents about the importance of handwashing and distributed more than a thousand bars of soap.

“When I gave a soap bar to each of the children, seeing their faces delight in joy and take so much appreciation in it, it really spoke volumes to me and inspired me to try to make United2Care bigger,” Arun said. “I know who I’m impacting now.”

This year, Arun and his team had planned to launch more initiatives in collaboration with King’s Academy’s annual service trips to places including the Dominican Republic and Ecuador. But COVID-19 derailed the plan, and Arun and his team had to come up with a way to keep their mission alive at a time when their message was more critical than ever.

“At first, it was honestly really, really hard,” Arun said, “because all the hard work was just out the window due to the COVID.”

But that was by no means the end. The nonprofit launched a “Stop COVID-19 at Home” project in conjunction with MiOra, another public health nonprofit. Arun and his team created special prevention kits—complete with masks, face shields, portable curtains and contract tracing resources—and distributed them to testing sites around the Bay Area.

In addition to the physical kits, Arun and his team have been working on digital resources for people to access during the pandemic. They hosted handwashing classes for younger children as part of a camp put on by another high schooler-led nonprofit in Louisiana. They also kicked off a series of their own webinars, where they interview public health experts on Instagram.