Celebrating Overachievement
Since 2016, Pilot Pen has recognized extraordinary overachievers who go above and beyond their everyday duties to improve the lives of others. Below is a list of our amazing winners of the Overachievers Grant and Overachievers Student Grant from previous years.
Nishawnda Wiles
Nishawnda’s Overachieving Works: Founder of The RKFD Lightning, Women’s Semi-Pro Basketball Team
Nishawnda is a full-time Business Analyst, wife, mother, Air Force veteran, and current Graduate student with a passion for basketball and for making a difference in her community. Although a service-related injury prevented her from playing the game she loved, Nishawnda wanted to use her skills to provide opportunities and empowerment for female athletes in her hometown.
Nishawnda founded the RKFD Lightning semi-pro Women’s basketball team with the mission is to inspire women and girls that anything is possible and to create empowered community. She runs all team related operations, sponsorships and marketing.
Through her organization, Nishawnda has provided the launch pad for local female athletes to embark on professional careers, and also provided youth players with inspiration, motivation, and a sense of empowerment.
Participating in sports has been shown to help students with academic performance. A national education study found that the grade point average for athletes was higher than those not involved in athletics. Athletes also miss fewer school days.
Going forward, Nishawnda’s goal is to create even more opportunities through basketball with youth developmental leagues, and camps for students. Nishawnda believes basketball can be the beginning of so many opportunities for girls and young women. The key is breaking down any barrier and inspiring young women to reach for their dreams.
Divyansh Agrawal
Divyansh’s Overachieving Works: Founder and CEO of the Junior Philanthropists Foundation
Divyansh Agrawal is an influential high school student and the founder and CEO of the Junior Philanthropists Foundation (JPF), the world’s largest youth-led 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to fostering the next generation of environmental leaders through environmental policy and education.
As a child, Divyansh loved the outdoors and spent most of his time enjoying the gifts of nature. Through JPF, Divyansh strives to foster that same passion for the environment by empowering youth leaders and driving action on pressing environmental issues. JPF has been impactful in various ways, engaging over 20,000 learners and 40,000 seniors across five continents. Under Divyansh’s leadership, JPF has supported 50 California bills on its legislative slate by speaking at hearings, sending in letters of support, and mobilizing students.
Outside of JPF, Divyansh has donated art supplies and has run art classes at the Goodness Village, a community of homes for previously homeless families. He also serves as the Secretary of the Dublin Mayor’s Council, where he helps manage six community projects. Divyansh’s dedication to service is evident in his various roles, including co-founding his school’s American Cancer Society Club, which raised about $700 for cancer research. His commitment to environmental conservation and youth empowerment continues to inspire many.
Marcy Bursac
Marcy’s Overachieving Works: Founder of The Forgotten Adoption Option
Marcy is a professional, an author, a wife, a mother, has a podcast, and recently completed her MBA. In her spare time, she runs her self-made non-profit organization, “The Forgotten Adoption Option.” She and her husband Nathan adopted a sibling pair from the foster care system 10 years ago. This sparked her drive to create awareness and accessible help for children in foster care and interested potential adoptive parents.
To date, Marcy has helped over 11,555 future adoptive parents through the process of bringing children in foster care into their families. In the US, 37% of families say that they have thought about adopting, but the process can be confusing and overwhelming. Marcy’s organization, The Forgotten Adoption Option, helps guide potential adoptive parents through the complex process of adopting through foster care, so even more children can find their forever families.
There are approximately 113,000 children in the foster care system who are waiting to have a forever family. These children are often overlooked. Many families who want to adopt view children in foster care as seeking a temporary family, although this is true only about 50% of the time. The other 50% of children in foster care are currently adoptable. Marcy’s goal is to help the approximately 113,000 children in foster care who could be adopted, to find loving forever families.
Elyse McManus
Elyse’s Overachieving Works: Joann McManus Academy
Meet Elyse McManus – a 17-year-old rising senior at Bancroft High School in Worcester, Massachusetts. Elyse has singlehandedly provided educational access and improved the quality of life for numerous students in Tanzania through her support of the Joann McManus Academy (JMA). JMA provides more than three hundred students with clothing, books, food, education, and all day-to-day essentials. The students, aged 3-7, who attend the academy are either orphans or extremely underprivileged. Elyse’s grandmother was one of the founders of the school, and Elyse has been consistently committed to helping fund the school’s works. By age 13, she tutored 15 hours a week with 100% of her paychecks donated to JMA and its projects. Recently, Elyse spearheaded raised donations for additions to the school including: a playground, an art room, a nap room with mattresses, an indoor bathroom, two new classrooms that allowed separate classes by age, as well as the purchase of a school bus. Elyse will be donating $10,000 of the award to fund further expansion of JMA. The remaining $2,500 will be donated to Living Waters Children Center, which supports providing water to vulnerable children in poor regions.
Beth Ann Fawcett
Beth Ann’s Overachieving Works: Energized by Ebony
Beth Ann works as an office assistant/admin/customer service for Gilpin Products, by day. At night, she turns her attention to her non-profit, Energized by Ebony, named after her late daughter, Ebony. Beth Ann welcomed Ebony into her home when she was four-and-a-half-years-old as a foster child. Then, as a single mother, adopted Ebony on her fifth birthday in May of 2005. Soon after, Ebony battled 3 relapses with Stage 4 Neuroblastoma cancer but never lost her will to fight. While enduring countless procedures, tests, and appointments, Ebony and Beth Ann were determined to continue making memories together and ‘paying it forward’ by helping other families.
Energized by Ebony started with a conversation between Ebony and her mom, Beth Ann, when Ebony explained she wanted to help kids like her “Keep Smiling and Keep Making Memories.” Together, they created activities and gifts, designed to distract the kids from the treatments or procedures they were undergoing, and provided them to other children and families in the pediatric oncology units. After Ebony passed away at the young age of nine, Beth Ann continued to honor Ebony’s wishes through Energized by Ebony, which has expanded to provide both New Diagnosis Kits and homemade monthly activity bags to pediatric oncology patients.
As overachieving and unstoppable as the G2 is, Beth Ann has been persistent and has been a finalist in the G2 Overachievers Grant for five years. Each year, the Pilot team has been honored to see the impact and overachieving works of Energized by Ebony continue to grow, with her goals for the grant funds shifting to keep up with the growth they experience each passing year. Since inception, nearly 5,000 activity bags have been provided to children so far, and with the help of the $100,000 grant, Beth Ann’s purchasing power for activity bags to help children and families will grow even larger.
Click here to read the full press release about the 2021 G2 Overachievers Grant Winners.
Miller Manguno
Miller’s Overachieving Works: Operation Orange Haven
Miller is a recent high school graduate, honors student, captain of both the varsity football and lacrosse teams, student body leader, and founder of Operation Orange Haven. Orange Mound, a community outside of Memphis, TN, is considered a food desert: an urban area where it is difficult to buy affordable or fresh food and with a population that has extremely low access to supermarkets or grocers. Operation Orange Haven hosts food drives to supplement the needs of the residents. Since inception, Miller through his overachieving works has donated 42,000 pounds of food, impacting an estimated 1,000 people in the community. In addition to the weekly food drives, Operation Orange Haven evolved as new needs within the community were discovered, and has included projects like providing laundry baskets containing the detergent, dryer sheets and quarters needed for laundry, and providing bunk beds and linens for children in the community needing a place to sleep. Miller will use the grant funds to continue the good works of Operation Orange Haven when he moves away for college in the fall.
Click here to read the full press release about the 2021 G2 Overachievers Grant Winners.
Neeraj Kapoor
Neeraj’s Overachieving Works: Learn To Be
Neeraj is a software engineer, by day, at a healthcare startup company called Scanwell Health and builds at home diagnostic tools and tests using smartphones for malaria, chronic kidney disease, urinary tract infections, and now COVID-19 tests. His life goal is to not only do meaningful work with his career, but also change the world for the better. At night he turns his attention to Learn To Be to help fight and fix educational inequality in the United States.
30 million underserved children in America suffer with limited access to quality education. As the world flipped upside down with the global pandemic, the educational system transitioned to virtual learning,which is a challenging change, further limiting the underserved communities to quality education. Learn To Be, established in 2007 by Neeraj, is an educational non-profit that brings free one-on-one tutoring for underserved youth. Learn To Be connects volunteer tutors to children in grades K-12 in an online classroom, where the two can meet at least twice a week for tutoring lessons and classroom help.
Since the inception of Learn To Be, Neeraj has made impactful differences in the lives of his students. He has helped 7,000 students with tutoring, with an average exam score increase of 16%, and average letter grade increase overall.
Jordan Grabelle
Jordan’s Overachieving Works: Love Letters for Literacy
Jordan is a high school junior who is the founder and executive director of a nonprofit called Love Letters for Literacy (LLL). LLL equips families in need with handmade literacy packets to make teaching the letters of the alphabet easy and fun. A child’s ability to succeed in school, attend college, and earn a higher salary all begins with the ability to read. LLL sets out to change the fact that lower-income children typically know significantly fewer letters of the alphabet when entering kindergarten than their more affluent peers. LLL seeks to level the educational playing field. Its packets teach families how to make learning the alphabet into a game to promote early literacy while encouraging a lifelong love of reading. Each literacy packet includes simple educational games, a set of 26 flashcards and a handwritten, personalized note. To date, LLL has sent out over 40,000 packets in 6 1/2 years to children in all 50 states, 30 countries and 6 continents. In Jordan’s spare time, she is President of her school’s Model United Nations Club, plays varsity field hockey, and is the Editor-in-Chief of her school’s journalism program.
Samii Emdur
Samii’s Overachieving Works: Co-Founder of Camp to Belong, River Valley
Samii Emdur is a pediatric oncology nurse at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, but her passion for helping children extends far beyond her profession. Samii first became a foster parent at the age of 23. Since then she has fostered 10 children including her daughter, whom she recently adopted. These experiences gave Samii a deep understanding of the challenges faced by siblings in the foster care system, inspiring her to co-found Camp to Belong, River Valley in 2018. Camp to Belong is a nonprofit whose mission is to reunite siblings separated in foster care. In 2019, the camp reunited more than 40 siblings ages 7-18. So far in 2020, the camp has hosted a virtual camp for 50 campers, ages 4-18, allowing them to reconnect, despite the challenges of Covid-19. Over the next 5 years, Samii’s goal is to continue to reunite foster siblings and strengthen these important connections by providing opportunities to create more positive childhood memories.
Cyrus Rosen
Cyrus’ Overachieving Works: Bubl Health (app)
Cyrus is a junior in high school who created a digital platform called Bubl Health that enables patients with the same diagnosis to connect across the world to support each other by sharing tips, stories and experiences. Bubl Health’s mission is to connect patients with similar diagnosis, so no one has to feel alone about their health issues. Cyrus recognizes that human connection can be an important part of the recovery and cure process. Cyrus gave a Tedx Talk in 2019 called “Connection is Part of the Cure” to share his vision for Bubl Health. He is a National Honor Society member and, a varsity athlete. In his spare time he is a drummer, a youth hockey coach and the Vice President of the Entrepreneurship Club that he co-founded.
Cyrus’ Plans for the Grant Award
Cyrus’ objective is to continue to improve and grow Bubl Health in his free time. He plans to put the $12,500 grant award toward his college tuition. His high school, The Charter School of Wilmington, will use their $2,500 award to continue to support and foster the overachieving works of students.
Greg Thorpe
Greg’s Charity: JUST-a-BREAK
Greg is an inspiring person. He is a father of three and a high school Religion teacher. In 2013, the Thorpe family’s lives would change forever when their wife and mother, Jen, was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Though the family travelled to various hospitals and treatment centers, Jen ultimately lost her battle with the disease on Dec 20, 2015. But, the Thorpe’s tremendous trial resulted in an amazing charity called JUST-a-BREAK.
In the final months of Jen’s life, Greg and his family spent numerous nights and days at a treatment center in Salt Lake City, UT. As is the case for most patients and their families, much of their time was spent waiting and worrying. How many more treatments? Will these test results be any different? What will the next appointment or procedure be? Out of their own funds, Greg and Jen began purchasing movie tickets and restaurant gift cards for nurses to anonymously hand out to other patients’ families. Their intention was to share a small blessing, help many in “desperate” situations by allowing them to literally take break and “forget about cancer” for a few hours, or a couple days. Cancer treatments are very expensive and can burden families financially, but with JUST-a-BREAK packages, hundreds of families have been given a breather and chance to spend quality time together when it mattered most.
Greg Thorpe’s Plan for the $50,000 Grant Award
Thanks to Greg’s proven ability to secure dollar-to-dollar matching from many of the business he sources his gift cards from, he plans to make this $50,000 grant go as far as possible for the families he serves. He plans to purchase mini-getaways for them, and more toward setting up additional chapters of his family’s charity. Greg’s ultimate goal is to have JUST-a-BREAK chapters in every one of the fifty United States.
Ian McKenna
Ian’s Charity: Giving Gardens
One Christmas morning, Ian’s mother unexpectedly woke him and his little sister before dawn and drove them to an underserved area in their hometown of Austin, TX. Their mission was to surprise his sister’s classmate – whose family had not been able to afford Christmas gifts – with presents from Santa Claus for the very first time. Ian started thinking about the kids in his school who receive lunch but don’t have (healthy) food available at home. This was how the Giving Garden was born. Ian wanted to create a place where kids could grow fresh fruits and vegetables for other kids who’s families might be struggling to afford fresh produce and healthy foods.
Ian’s first garden was at an elementary school. With his first harvest, he was able to feed nine families. He has expanded to several more student-run community gardens at multiple elementary schools. Giving Gardens lets kids explore real-world problems and use a hands-on approach to help develop solutions. Ian, who is now 14, travels to different schools and teaches cooking demos for people who are unfamiliar with certain vegetables. In Ian’s first year, he grew 750 pounds of vegetables, all of which were donated to places like the Central Texas Food Bank. The biggest challenge he faces is theft from his gardens, but he takes this in stride, saying he hopes that the kids/families who are stealing this food genuinely need it, but are too shy to ask.
Ian McKenna’s Plans for the Grant Award
Ian plans to use his $12,500 grant for college tuition so he can gain the skills needed to hopefully make an even greater impact on social issues like hunger. The remaining $2,500 will go to Ian’s school to help continue fostering overachievement among their students.
Jacqueline Norvell
Congratulations to Jacqueline Norvell, “Brown Bag Lady”!
Jacqueline is the 2017 recipient of the $50,000 G2 Overachievers Grant! Jacqueline is an overachiever who truly goes above and beyond to inspire and help others in her community. In December of 2012, Jacqueline and her son took her Christmas bonus money, made turkey dinners and hand delivered them to the homeless on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. She did it again in 2013, and by 2014 she had a mission: the “Brown Bag Lady” was born.
She and her team meet on the first Sunday of every month, make 200 brown bag lunches and distribute them on Skid Row. Through her tireless efforts to help and feed others, Jacqueline and her team have made and delivered over 50,000 brown bag meals, along with clothing, blankets and other resources to the homeless living on Skid Row.
Jacqueline’s overachieving work in serving her community has inspired people nationwide to help those around them! Congratulations to the “Brown Bag Lady” and thank you to all the volunteers she has inspired!
Are you, or someone you know, an Overachiever? Nominate them for the 2018 G2 Overachievers Grant.
Erin Manuel
She is the first-ever recipient of the $15,000 G2 Overachievers Student Grant!
Erin goes above and beyond to help others and is working to help make the world a better place. Since age 7, she has raised over $16,000 to provide health, education and food programs for Haitians.
In 2016, she was invited to the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the What If? Foundation‘s new school, The Father Jeri School. For her trip, she raised enough money to bring 156 Luci Lights (solar paneled lanterns), about 30 pounds of school supplies, and a check for more than $900 for the school. After her visit, she learned that the school had 2-3 hours of sporadic power each day; so for her next trip, she developed and installed a solar USB charging station for students and teachers to charge cell phones and other devices.
She continues to focus on more education initiatives through the school and food programs supported by the What If? Foundation.
Erin is truly the epitome of an Overachiever and shows that when you are passionate about a cause, even as a student, you can really make a difference.
Dr. Rebecca Constantino
Dr. Rebecca Constantino is truly an overachiever – a graduate Professor in language acquisition at the University of California, a mother of three, and the founder of Access Books. Access Books is a non-profit organization that refurbishes inner-city school libraries and has provided over 2 million books to underserved libraries and children in the Los Angeles area. Given the indisputable linkage between literacy and future success, Rebecca is a dedicated champion for these children’s futures.
“She is a tireless (and uncompensated) worker who overcomes all obstacles to ensure that there is no discrimination in literacy. All children should have access to great books and a great library. Poverty should not be a factor in learning and becoming a reader.”
Thousands of qualified candidates applied for the grant and were carefully considered over the course of the review process. Rebecca’s unflagging dedication and commendable achievements embody what it means to be an overachiever.
Dr. Constantino has been awarded the $50,000 “G2 Overachiever’s Grant” for her tireless efforts that have helped rewrite the stories of these at-risk children by giving them the tools to help them overachieve in the future.
Our heartfelt congratulations and thanks go to the amazing Access Books volunteers and to their inspirational leader, Dr. Rebecca Constantino.
Apply For The 2024 Grant
Send a handwritten story describing what you or someone you know is doing to be a difference-maker. Share where it happened, how it worked, who it impacted and why it mattered. The 2024 G2 Overachievers Grant nomination period opens on July 15, 2024.
View the rules for the
2024 G2 Overachievers Grant or the 2024 G2 Overachievers Student Grant.
