In 2021, Michael Sanchez ’23 ran across an announcement in his email: The Contribution Project was offering Cornell students $400 to implement any project that made a contribution, purposefully not defined – because that part was up to the students.

Sanchez, like many students, thought it was too good to be true.

“Like borderline spam,” he said. Still, without foreseeing the impact on his community, he filled out a couple of questions online and hit send with a sense of hope.

“It made me feel empowered,” he said.

Sanchez was one of 100 Cornell students selected to receive funding that year and is one of more than 800 college students, across Cornell and four SUNY campuses, who have received funding since the project began at Cornell in 2019. The projects, chosen at random and without restriction, have been as diverse as the student bodies and their passions – from students making one-time donations to local nonprofits or campus groups, to building the foundations for longer-term projects.

Credit: Provided

One student bought plane tickets so her roommate’s family could attend her graduation. One donated a 3D printer to an elementary school and taught kids how to use it. Another started a group to help disadvantaged youth in Nepal apply to college abroad, and another installed a food pantry at a local free clinic. The list goes on, and touches communities around the country and the world.

In 2024, a national iteration expanded the project’s reach and range, opening eligibility to anyone in the U.S. ages 14 to 25 and working with community partners to engage under-resourced communities. All told, the project has disbursed more than $500,000 to over 1,300 participants, funding projects that allow young people to exercise their agency, often building relationships, community and a deep sense of purpose in the process.

“The Contribution Project started as just an idea: What happens when you ask young people to make a contribution to themselves or others?” said Anthony Burrow, the project’s founder and Ferris Family Associate Professor of Life Course Studies and director of the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research in the College of Human Ecology. “What we’ve found is that students are largely using this project to do things to benefit others. Now, on top of that insight, we have begun exploring how contributing might also favorably impact the contributors.”

Credit: Provided

Sanchez used his two awards, one in 2021 and another in 2023, to buy sun lamps and plants for the Cornell Veterans House, where he lived, and then plaques of appreciation for facilities and dining staff. One of those staff was Peter Monteleone, a fellow veteran, who said he’s reminded of the honor every time he passes a framed photo of himself – plaque in hand, with the students – that rests on one of the house’s fireplace mantles.

“I was flabbergasted and honored,” he said. “I’m still honored.”

“Seeing him light up – it meant a lot, and then we started to share stories. In the weeks and months after that, I felt like it was a better environment,” Sanchez said. “The project allowed me a means to show that we care about the community and the people who live and work in the house, and it helped foster a culture of family. And the Contribution Project was the match that lit the fire.”

‘A beautiful thing’

Burrow began the project because of a perceived incongruity: In popular media, he noticed young people were often being portrayed as navel-gazing, coddled and selfish.

“That image ran counter to what I was seeing in my day-to-day work on a college campus,” he said.

At the same time, scholars in Burrow’s field were asking whether contribution was a necessary element of youth development, like self-esteem or a sense of identity. Burrow thought: Why not give young people the opportunity and see what they do with it?

Credit: Juan Vazquez-Leddon/Provided

“At the start, it wasn’t about testing a hypothesis. It was just creating a platform and observing what happens when emerging adults show up,” Burrow said.

After the initial positive response in 2019, Burrow secured more funding – from Hopelab, a social impact investor interested in youth well-being – and began to ask questions about the effect of the project on participants. His lab developed surveys that gauge participants’ sense of agency, purpose and hope, among other metrics, before and after the project.

Multiple students described the project – and the agency it gave them – as transformative.

“It was incredibly supporting and empowering to be able, at a young age, to directly try to address disparities and challenges in communities and to actively collaborate with students, friends and faculty,” said Eric Kohut ’22, who used the $400 to create a website and conduct outreach for a community service organization he soon founded, Hudson Origin, that provides mental health resources and support for Hispanic communities in northern New Jersey.

“It was one of the first pieces of funding I’d ever received for Hudson Origin,” Kohut said, “and it gave me so much hope and excitement and really expanded into my future and my community – it was just a beautiful thing.”

Melanie Marshall ’24 used her award to plant a native persimmon tree on Libe Slope, and said the project allowed her to reflect and manifest what she’d learned abroad, about peoples’ connections to their food systems.

“I learned this beautiful way to see the world, and this project allowed me to translate that, to keep passing it on,” she said.

For Oscar Llodra ’25 – who used the funds to design a new way of approaching mobile, affordable housing through a DIY camper – having the agency to pursue his own vision was something he’d dreamed of as a student, but the project made it a reality.

“That’s why it feels so unreal, because you’re being given resources to exist in that state of self-actualization, and it’s just so inspiring, not only to do the project but tell people about the project, to see them get inspired, to see everyone else’s projects,” said Llodra, an architecture major in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

Credit: Devin Flores/Cornell University

In many instances, the Contribution Project has highlighted and strengthened community engagement on campuses. Jeremy Pelletier, assistant director of campus engagement at SUNY Binghamton’s Center for Civic Engagement, said many of the students who apply for the project are already involved in service and often use the funds to extend and deepen the work they do with partners.

“Often our students are not just simply doing a project, but they also collaborate and connect with campus partners and community partners,” Pelletier said. “It’s been a great partnership with Cornell and a fantastic project.”

The Contribution Project puts on a yearly showcase for all participants – this year held online on April 24 – and students said seeing others’ projects made them feel a palpable excitement, warmth and commitment, and a sense of support for community work.

Ever since starting the project, Burrow has felt that, too.

“This project has offered a new narrative about students,” Burrow said. “Far from being self-interested, our campus is filled with young people eager to contribute. Each year, applications overwhelm our funding capacity. The real insight? We’re simply not creating enough opportunities to match students’ tremendous desire to make a difference. Perhaps this project’s greatest impact is highlighting the need for more initiatives that unlock the potential these young people are so ready to fulfill.”

Burrow said the project’s results are a call to think differently about matching students with resources and organizations and about how much potential and power students have to be agents of good. Kohut agreed.

“Cornell is building these bridges through these wonderful projects and opportunities, but then the students themselves are the bridges, through their creative lenses, through the connections they have to their communities,” he said. “I just remember feeling so much hope, hopeful for the things, in collaboration with other people, that I could do.”

‘A world of possibility’

If the Contribution Project has had a transformative impact on college students and college campuses, what could it do for communities outside academia?

The National Contribution Project, run by a nonprofit co-founded by Burrow called Purpose Commons, aims to expand the project’s reach and to understand its potential for a younger, more diverse and marginalized demographic, and to study the difference it can make in communities.

“So many times, I heard from alumni of the public school system where I worked before, that they’re struggling with purpose and what they’re supposed to be doing,” said TeRay Esquibel, founding executive director of Purpose Commons. “If we can start to get a sense of what young people see as the challenges or gaps, what actually helps prepare them, the things that cultivate that sense of purpose, then I think we can start asking some really important questions about the systems and structures students rely on.”

Purpose Commons does the work of engaging community partners and building community infrastructure – they’ve already worked with more than 30 youth-serving organizations across the U.S. and conducted a regional pilot in the greater Cincinnati area. The organization also creates a two-way bridge for Burrow’s research efforts: His team will continue to survey the national participants and collect data, but the research is in collaboration with those community partners.

“We have this infrastructure where we can go in and do these things meaningfully,” Esquibel said. “The community can help us shape and understand the questions we want to ask. Through this iterative process, we can have a better understanding with our partners, with our communities, and then hopefully scale up and make this accessible, because it was co-designed by the youth and the communities together.”

Betsy Peterson, director of the National Contribution Project, said the effort may be particularly impactful for younger kids who are developing a sense of independence and agency with few outlets or resources to express it.

“What we’ve already noticed is that well-intentioned adults get in the way,” Peterson said. “That’s shown us how much adults are making decisions for young people and how unique an opportunity this is. If kids’ orientation to the world is that they take direction from adults, then this is a way to flip that on its head and create a world of possibility.”

Ultimately, Esquibel said the goal of the project across the national and college programs is the same: to ask better questions about purpose, to understand its origins and impacts, and to mobilize community engagement, not only for the sake of communities but for participants.

“I think this is going to break open our ability to think about purpose and how we operate,” he said, “and we’re seeing a lot of people unlock a sense of purpose in the process.”

“By endowing the responsibility to individuals, they’re activating members to engage but also giving them the opportunity to decide what their values are,” Llodra said. “That’s a real reckoning. That’s why it’s so special.”