NYLC Youth Advisory Council Member Wins Youth Service Awards

Zach Certner, age 16, has received national recognition for his service to special needs children, having won the Jefferson Awards for Public Service’s Youth Service Challenge for individual passion, as well as the Hasbro Community Action Hero Award. When he and his brother, Matthew Certner, began Special Needs Athletic Programs, Inc. (SNAP) in their hometown of Morristown, N.J., Zach supported the 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in its mission to inspire youth to work together through athletics, peer mentoring activities, and educational programs. Zach now serves as the President of SNAP and has spent the past year scaling up its operations.

“The awards I have been receiving have been great, but … they also highlight the work of my mentors to spread the word and help us expand all of [SNAP’s] programs,” stated Zach in response to his reaction to winning the awards.

Zach’s biography for the Hasbro Community Action Hero Award explains SNAP’s three-pronged approach to improving the lives of special needs children. These include its sports clinics, which has trained more than 500 mentors to implement the clinics five days per week, the In House Buddy Program, which matches two mentors to one special needs child to spend time at the child’s home, and the recent addition of sensitivity trainings, which promote a culture of acceptance into the classroom.

Zach has taken SNAP's mission from classroom to classroom throughout New Jersey and facilitated more than 108 workshops, educating more than 2,700 kids about the challenges of their special needs classmates.  “I hope to take SNAP to a statewide level in New Jersey by the end of this year,” he explained. “With the bullying problems rising, SNAP offers programs to fight that.”

That kind of impact is what caught the attention of Maryann Younger, a national director for the Jefferson Awards.  “It starts with a need and doing something about it,” said Maryann Younger. “[SNAP] added programming and all of the logistics involved, and Zach is 16!” SNAP was chosen out of nearly 5,000 youth-led service projects that were nominated to win the Jefferson Awards for Public Service’s Youth Service Challenge as the top project of the year, and was granted the opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C., to receive a plaque and discuss his work in front of a national audience. As the winner of the Hasbro Community Action Hero Award, Zach will receive a $1,000 educational scholarship presented by Hasbro Children's Fund and generationOn.

Beyond the publicity and financial compensation, these awards have validated Zach’s abilities as a young leader and inspired him to serve as an example for others looking to accomplish similar gains. Zach’s advice is to “find something you are passionate about, continue to work for your goals, [and] never give up. … any act of kindness, either on a big scale or very small, is still a progression toward changing the world.”