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Senior Anya Gruener is Gulliver Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in the area of Social Science.
Her Silver Knight project is called the Active Love Foundation. She started the foundation her freshman year along with her sister and two friends.
“It’s a 501C3 that creates awareness for domestic violence and human trafficking and empowers victims,” she says.
The Active Love Foundation has had a four-year partnership with Wild Fork Foods to sell reusable tote bags with the proceeds going to help domestic violence and human trafficking victims.
The totes are made of Jute material, a natural fiber.
“For us and Wild Fork Foods, sustainably is incredibly important,” she says. “We only sell reusable totes, made out of natural materials that are ethically sourced.”
The tote sales have enabled them to raise six-figure revenue in the past four years.
“It originally started in Miami, helping No More Tears,” she says. “During the pandemic, their funding fell. We wanted to find a way to continue raising money for victim services.
The one place people were still actively going to was grocery stores. We started to contact different brands, including Wild Fork, which was starting to come to South Florida at that time.”
She also co-founded a school club called Don’t Close Your Eyes.
“It aims to educate the student body about domestic violence and trafficking,” she says.
“We hope to decrease the amount of ignorance that often surrounds trafficking and abuse.
We are looking to open chapters of Don’t Close Your Eyes at other schools.”
She’s been talking to a student at Pine Crest School, a private school with campuses in Boca Raton and Ft. Lauderdale.
Although she will be going off to college in the fall, the organization will continue both locally and wherever she and the other founders attend college.
The organization has been donating money to different families, and they are using the money for different victim services.
She also worked and is currently publishing her Extended Essay for the International Baccalaureate program titled What are the relationships between the human trafficking of undocumented Latinx immigrants in Miami and the legal definition of personhood?
In June 2022, Gruener went on a mission trip to Poland with the CADENA Foundation, where she volunteered at the largest refugee camp for refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine.
“As the youngest volunteer, I volunteered at the PTAK Humanitarian Aid Centre for a month,” she says. “During war, there are always spikes in human trafficking. We would provide a safe place for over 250 children to ensure their safety amidst prevalent trafficking threats.”
They provided daycare from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. to ensure proper care, while parents went out to arrange for housing and other needs.
For college, she will attend Stanford University, where she hopes to work at the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab. She was accepted to 18 of the schools she applied to.
At Gulliver, she’s the managing editor of the Raider Voice, the school paper.
“I pioneered the Raider Voice en Espanol,” she says.
Previously, she’s been multimedia editor, and copy editor.
She was able to get a job at the JTA, an outside news agency.
Gruener is the Gulliver student body president. She was the junior class president last year. She founded RaiderTalk, after a TedEd model.
She’s also president of the Health Information Project (HIP). The peer counselors teach eight modules each year. One module educates the freshmen students on domestic violence and trafficking.
“It is my hope to decrease misconceptions and expose youth to the reality that every person can be trafficked and abused,” she says.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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