Teen Advisory Group Projects

The goal of the “Be Brave, Be Thoughtful, and Be Kind” project was to create videos to raise awareness of food allergies. We believe that it is crucial for people to be aware of and understand the challenges of having food allergies for them to be able to support those with allergies. Furthermore, our videos are also targeted to motivate and encourage those with food allergies as well.

Our first video, Be Brave, is about how managing our allergies helps our lives and we hope our stories and our experiences encourage others to be brave and confident with their allergies.

Our second video, Be Thoughtful and Be Kind, educates others about how to be thoughtful and considerate towards people with food allergies. 

Project Lead: Kelly Tung

Team: Lizzy Anderlik, Scout Brodsky, Zachary Brunet, Nicholas Cannistraci,Lauren Cohen, Kelly Kang, Clare Kirchner, Michael Lan, Hannah Park, Josephine Schizer, Autumn Schless,Campbell Shaw and Tony Valade

Unfortunately, many are affected by poverty or an inability to access food, and this crisis is exacerbated by food restrictions such as allergies. Therefore, we defined our mission to address this crisis: “To create allergy friendly food drives that benefit low-income members of the food allergy community by providing increased access and quantity of viable food options”. Due to the varying locations of the TAG members, we were able to hold allergy-friendly food drives in different areas of the country. Our group had meetings on how we would execute this project, created a presentation to present to the food bank, and created an email outline for members to refer to when contacting the food bank. Using these resources and collaborating with TAG members, we were able to execute this project in our local communities and benefit the food allergy community.

Team Leads: Anisah Daniel, Celeste Virador

Team: Caitlin Furey, Allyson Go, Magdalene Grace, Julia Gray, Sara Hantgan, Cassie Jeng, Ally Kalishman, Magdalene Kausler, Ryken Mak, Sophie Meade, Serina Menon, Connor Mitchell, Morgan Romo, Josh Rubel and Sophie Schmults

Today’s teenagers are busy and often away from home because of sports, school, part-time jobs, volunteer work and time with friends. We need portable snacks that we can easily grab as fuel. Snack options are endless in supermarket aisles, but for teens with food allergies, grabbing a snack is not always a simple choice and can even be life-threatening. Labels can be misleading and safe options are not plentiful.

To help address this issue, some TAG members did a teen taste panel and report.

Project Lead: Lauren Rivera

Team: Fahran Bajaj, Zach Brener, Caitlyn Carter, Jean Fermi, Teresa Hooker, Angela Li, Josephine Schizer, Kari Smelter and Ava Wellener

The Importance of Epinephrine is a TAG Project with the goal of educating teenagers on the life-saving and beneficial qualities of epinephrine. Teens may be seriously injured or even die due to being afraid to use epinephrine, and the goal of the project is to educate them so that statistic can lower. To achieve this goal, they created many infographics and videos about epinephrine. They posted them on their very own Instagram account with the purpose of directly targeting teenagers. By the end of the year, we have accumulated 87 followers, and we plan to continue this project for years to come by expanding to other social platforms, adding more content and giving talks.

Team Lead: Ramsey Makan

Team: Fahran Bajaj, Scout Brodsky, Nicholas Cannistraci, Lauren Cohen, Matthew Doucette, Isabel Dowling, Jack Kapcar, Clare Kirchner, Serina Menon, Sarah Mufson, Justin Rothenberg, Andrea Schmidt, Scout Sylves-Berry, Annie Walsh and Molly Ward

As TAG leaders this year, Andrew and Michelle Nazareth started a campaign encouraging other TAG members to read a food allergy friendly book to younger kids.  They suggested “Can I Have Some Cake Too?”  by Melanie Nazareth.  The purpose of the campaign was not only to encourage TAG members to reach out to younger kids with food allergies, but also give them courage and hope that they are not alone in this journey.

Project Leads: Andrew Nazareth, Michelle Nazareth

Team: Teresa Hooker, Jack Kapcar, Lexie Malik, Sophie Malik and Jaycee Rogers

The focus of this research project was to evaluate the food allergy accommodation level provided on various cruise lines. Our group evaluated a long list of questions. Some cruise lines had information available on the company website.  For others, we were able to ask questions on the phone.  And some had very little information on the website or phone about food allergies. Therefore, very different levels of information are presented for each cruise line.

Team Lead: Charlotte Pearce

Team: Zach Brener, Zach Conroy, Jack Lumpinski

Throughout the year I worked with my brother on creating his Eagle Scout project. We created a food allergy awareness video that our school district agreed to implement in the high school health class curriculum starting next year. To produce the video we used information from the numerous sources on the FARE website and reached out to other organizations like Red Sneakers for Oakley. The video emphasizes the severity of food allergies, why re-reading food labels every time is important and other information that is necessary for everyone to understand to keep people with food allergies safe. I have also reached out to elementary schools and middle schools in our community to share the video with them and hopefully get them on board with more food allergy safety in the future.

Ava Geissel

My project for this year was going to elementary schools in my town and presenting the Be a Pal presentation. At the start of the school year I emailed the school nurse proposing my idea and how close this was to my heart. I chose to do this because I know if I saw an older teenager talking about how food allergies are serious but still don’t make someone different would of made me not feel as embarrassed. The nurse loved this idea especially because her son has food allergies, and with her help, I set up presentations with a couple of teachers. Though I was very excited and nervous, the presentation went great.

Rylee Christian

This year we worked to brainstorm ideas to create a more engaging social media platform for FARE. We worked with FARE’s marketing team to get our ideas heard. One of the brilliant ideas that we came up with during our brainstorm was to create a video booth at the Contains Courage: Food Allergy Summit to produce more footage to use on social media, which was ultimately implemented.

Team Lead: Elise Buellesbach

Team: Lauren Cohen, Rebecca Fallick, Suraj Kalaria, Magdalene Kausler, Campbell Shaw, Ben Stack and Megan Tutundgian

After attending this year’s Contains: Courage Summit in Washington DC, Arjin convinced his aunt and uncle, who run an annual arts and crafts charity event (Art for Abhi) to donate all proceeds to FARE. Arjin spoke at the event to help people understand the severity of food allergies and shared some personal stories. He also presented on FARE and the work that is being done and needs to be done. Proceeds for this event are still coming in and close to $8,000.00 has been raised thus far.

Arjin Claire

Baseball is a traditional American pastime enjoyed by many. There’s nothing better than spending a warm summer afternoon at the ballpark, drinking lemonade, eating garlic fries and cheering on the team. For fans with food allergies, however, a trip to the ballpark can be a stressful and even life-threatening outing. TAG created this guide to help identify MLB ballparks that offer food allergy friendly programs, so that fans with food allergies can safely enjoy a baseball game.

Project Leader: Lauren Rivera

Team: Matthew Ciampa, Rebecca Fallick, Caroline French, Jaxon Groenhoff, Ethan Hirsch, Colin Lapus, Charlotte Pearce, Andrea Schmidt and Connor Wallis