BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM

This article is part of The Optimist Daily’s Local Changemakers 2026 series, spotlighting changemakers 30 and under.

Most social programs ask you to declare yourself before they’ll give you anything. You fill out a form, check a box, explain your circumstances to someone with authority over the outcome. Vivian Ho built All The Same Organization around the idea that this moment, identifying yourself as someone who needs help, was what kept people from asking at all. Vivian lives in Cedar Park, Texas, but the organization operates nationally. She is, remarkably, only 17 years old.

ATS delivers supply packages directly to low-income families through Title I schools: food, hygiene products, household necessities, school supplies. Families request what they need through an anonymous sign-up system. No one who receives support is required to name themselves as the recipient.

“Just because resources exist does not mean that it’s accessible,” wrote Anika Luangaphay, who co-founded ATS alongside Vivian. The anonymous system, Luangaphay explained, was designed to let families “choose what type of support they want” without attaching their identity to the request.

Reaching Title I families across the country

Since its founding, ATS has grown to more than 200 chapters with roughly 8,000 volunteers and has distributed over 150,000 supplies to families at Title I schools. In a single back-to-school season, the organization served five schools and delivered more than 15,000 school supplies. Vendor events in the Austin and Cedar Park area have raised more than $75,000 in goods.

ATS brings supplies directly to schools, removing the need for families to travel. Outreach is conducted across language barriers so that immigrant families can find and navigate the program without information being another wall to get over.

Aoto Yamazaki, a longtime volunteer, described Vivian’s approach as incredibly empathetic and well-thought-out: “What makes Vivian’s work especially meaningful to me is how intentionally she considers each student’s culture due to her past experiences as an immigrant.”

Cultural Surprises

Cultural Surprises works like this: volunteers research the cultural background of a recipient family, then create handmade arts and crafts based on what they find. The crafts go out alongside the supply packages. More than 500 crafts have been made for over 60 recipients. Volunteers don’t just pack boxes; they do the work to understand the people they’re packing for.

Yamazaki wrote that the program had changed what he understood about volunteering: “Being part of this work has taught me so much about cultures I previously knew little about, including Hmong culture.”

Luangaphay connected it directly to Vivian’s own history. “She had told me herself that she grew up suppressing her culture due to being a Vietnamese immigrant,” Luangaphay wrote, “so now she recognizes the students in Title I schools often neglect their own culture, too.” The crafts are partly a way of giving back something that growing up between cultures tends to cost.

ATS has now secured funding for a Cultural Spotlight Scholarship. Rather than asking volunteers to make crafts for recipients, this program invites students to create art and crafts inspired by their own cultures, with a short written description of what the piece means and where it comes from. Those descriptions get shared with a wider audience. Winners will receive $1,250. The goal, as Luangaphay described it, is to give participants “a deep dive into a culture, whether it’s their own or another person’s.”

A classroom, and what came after

After noticing a gap in career exposure at the schools she worked with, Vivian fundraised for medical supplies, including mannequins, suture kits, and stethoscopes, then developed a partnership with Age of Central Texas to build a functional medical classroom at Dobie Middle School.

When the school went through a turnaround and that classroom was shut down, she turned her attention to other Title I schools rather than walking away.

“Her willingness to keep finding ways to help, even when her original efforts did not go as planned, is something that has always stayed with me,” Yamazaki wrote.

Yamazaki saw the same thing in smaller moments. Early in his time with the organization, he told Vivian he wanted to start his own project after being inspired by her work. “She selflessly gave me her time, advice, and guidance, walking me through how to turn my ideas into something that could create a real impact,” he wrote. She was, at that point, a teenager running a multi-chapter national nonprofit.

Vivian received two nominations for this series: one from her co-founder and one from a volunteer she inspired to build something of his own. Both of them described an organization built on one idea: that people should be able to ask for help without giving anything of themselves away to get it. Learn more and get involved at www.allthesame.org.