Arlingtonian interviews juniors and app ambassadors Hope Perry and Xan Schuster about the POINT app.
Compiled by Bridget Mitchell, ‘22
Q: What is the POINT app?
PERRY: POINT has partnered with 140 organizations that are nonprofit. You can go on to the app and list your interests, pick from different activities that suit your interests and then they find organizations that need help from volunteers. They show the events and you just sign up for them.
SCHUSTER: It tells you everything specific about the event. For example, where it is, how many people they need for it, what you’re going to be doing there, and if you need anything for it.
Q: How did you get involved with the app?
SCHUSTER: We’ve done the [Walk to End Alzheimer’s]. I specifically got involved with POINT because I have known the founder for my whole life. She just reached out to me and asked if I would help her, and we’ve just helped her at two different POINT events where we asked people if they wanted to download the POINT app, and then of course, we did it at the high school, too. We would reach out and ask people to download it so that more people could get out and do service for the community.
Q: What kind of involvement have you seen fro students?
PERRY: I have seen some of our friends do it, but I don’t know about other people outside of our friend group. I know some people [say], “Oh, I actually might want to do this rather than just downloading it,” but I don’t know about people who have actually downloaded it and actually gone to an event, but I’ve heard people say that they want to.
Q: How do you plan to get students more involved?
PERRY: We were talking about doing some kind of club for it to get all of us together to brainstorm about how to make people more aware of the app, doing events within the school to get people to go to events outside of school or just keep talking about it with our friends as much as possible.
*Interview edited for length and clarity.
