Earlier this year, global beauty brand L’Oréal Paris USA announced its 2023 L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth, recognizing the charitable achievements of ten extraordinary non-profit leaders working to address the nation’s biggest issues. Included in the ten is MoCo high school student Shrusti Amula.
In 2022, Shrusti and her Rise N Shine Foundation was awarded a Climate and Energy Leadership Award for its “Can We Do Something About Food Waste?” project. This year, in its 18th year, the 2023 L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth class joined an incredible network of 170 previous honorees who champion a diverse range of causes and beautifully embody the brand’s iconic tagline, “Because You’re Worth It.” To help alleviate some of the challenges female non-profit leaders face, L’Oréal Paris will facilitate a grant of $25,000 for each honoree through its intermediary grantmaking partner, GlobalGiving. In addition, the brand will provide business mentorship and increased visibility through the brand’s national platforms.
About Shrusti: Shrusti Amula, a Clarksburg resident and student at Richard Montgomery High School, is the Founder of Rise N Shine Foundation, a youth-led non-profit organization dedicated to reducing food waste through composting and food recovery programs. She started her journey of service at the young age of seven after learning how much food is wasted and its harmful effects on our world. By the age of 12, she planned and implemented a composting program that was then adopted by her state for use in schools. To date, Amula has diverted around 100 thousand pounds of food waste from incinerators to become compost instead. The program now cultivates green habits in students, creates leadership opportunities, and helps them become climate changemakers of tomorrow.
In recent years she has expanded to food recovery in schools and businesses, after seeing the amount of uneaten food wasted and rising levels of food insecurity after the COVID-19 pandemic. Given its significant impact on combatting hunger, her program has been adopted by her county’s public school system and will be running in all 209 schools by June 2024. Her organization also partners with companies to redistribute food that would otherwise be wasted to homeless shelters and food banks. In the past year, she has donated approximately 150,000 meals to the food insecure community.