COVID-19 can get boring sometimes―stuck at home, can't hang out with friends. Anu Prasad and Anjali Gullapally are 16-year-olds from Central Jersey. They created Bezzie, a non-profit organization that give children in quarantine a chance to have fun and socialize with volunteers.
It is crucial for kids to talk and interact with others in their early years in order to fully develop social skills. However, this was taken due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Children are unable to stay in touch with friends due to them being too young to use social media. Bezzie gives children the opportunity to socialize while in quarantine by connecting volunteers with children to have conversations.
Each Bezzie volunteer is paired up with a child from anywhere around the world. After being paired, a list of themes/conversation starters for each day in the 15-day period will be sent out. Volunteers will then converse and connect with the children through voice or video calls for thirty minutes every day. Parents can also request extra activities for their volunteers to do with their kids, such as movies, storytelling, homework help, word games, drawing, and other games.
They started Bezzie in May and already have received over 600 volunteer applications and created a whole board of directors. The organization's name Bezzie is British slang meaning best friend. The co-founders believed it was the perfect name since they are best friends with each other, and also wanted to help children find and create bonds with their own best friends.
Bezzie's future plan is to spread more internationally so children from around the world can experience different types of cultures. Bezzie currently has international volunteers, so they are aiming to have international children enrolled.
Click here to view their website.
Click here to view their Instagram.