Student startup: ServUs.
The President’s Buckeye Accelerator: ServUS was one of six Ohio State student startup ventures chosen for the inaugural President’s Buckeye Accelerator cohort. The yearlong program, directed by Ohio State’s Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship, provides the teams with $50,000 in funding as well as mentorship, skill-building and community to help prepare them to launch their businesses.
ServUS has created a website for universities to match students to local service organizations. The platform allows students to explore service opportunities or create their own social projects while local service organizations themselves can recruit, manage and incentivize volunteers.
Founder and CEO: Yasmeen Quadri ’22 earned a degree in neuroscience with a pre-med focus. Along with founding ServUS and co-founding the SOAR Initiative, she will be attending Stanford Medical School in the fall, where she is currently the branch co-lead for the Suicide Prevention Line at Stanford University’s Muslims and Mental Health and Islamic Psychology Lab.
An ingrained drive: “Growing up Muslim, charity and volunteering is core to my identity. My first memory of service was being downtown (Cincinnati), handing out food during Ramadan. When I was 12, I started Cincinnati Muslim Girls with my friends and we’d volunteer everywhere, the Ronald McDonald House, Matthew 25: Ministries and various nonprofits in our local area. It transitioned to me being president of my youth group at my mosque, I was the first female president, it was a very formative deal for me in high school. In all, I’ve probably volunteered for 20 to 30 organizations.”
Coming to Ohio State: “Naturally, I wanted to get immersed in volunteering in college. But from what I could gather, there wasn’t a central hub of volunteering at Ohio State. Digital Flagship was just emerging and we were getting iPads. I thought, how cool would it be if on every iPad there’s an app that would match me to volunteer opportunities?
“But also, I’m a big music listener, I have like 700 playlists on Spotify. One thing I really liked about Spotify was you could select different genres and it makes recommendations, curates lists and matches you. That’s where the idea of matchmaking came from. My mom and I were literally in the garage of the Union before one of my interview weekends for the Eminence Scholarship Program, brainstorming this idea. I proposed the idea of ServUs to my Eminence advisor once I was admitted and Ohio State has been integral to everything we’ve done since.”
Startup weekend: “My second week at Ohio State, there was a Techstars startup weekend sponsored by Google in downtown Columbus. Without any idea of where it would take me, I stood in front of a group of strangers and pitched my idea. It was very out of my comfort zone but I made it to the finals and basically started recruiting people. My current co-founders Danielle Sullivan and Clayton Nelson both were original members from our team that weekend.”
“That’s something me and my friends were big on when we came to school, creating these cool ideas to help the community . . . The power of students is really something special.”
A vision for social good: “I’ve been saying ServUS will be a LinkedIn for social good, social enterprises and nonprofits. Ideally, departments at Ohio State or any university across the country would promote this to students once they get to campus. Students get connected to nonprofits or if they have an idea of their own — say reducing food insecurity on their campus — they can network and talk to different nonprofits and gain expertise, then form their own or help support existing ones.
“That’s something me and my friends were big on when we came to school, creating these cool ideas to help the community. One of those ideas was the SOAR Initiative and we literally got hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to help stop the opioid epidemic. The power of students is really something special.”
The importance of service: “Our team has been rapidly expanding. This year, as we got to know our new group of student recruits, I asked each member why they served. As each student told their story, there was a collective feeling; we were each drawn to service because we were partaking in something bigger than ourselves. It is fulfilling in a way nothing else can be fulfilling.”
