Growing up, Chloe Moshrefi volunteered extensively and was surrounded by philanthropic efforts. Her uncle — Shahram Daneshmand — co-founded the non-profit Miracle Babies in 2009 alongside Marjan Mortazavi. She was able to watch the foundation grow and expand from the ground up, an experience that led the sophomore majoring in biological sciences to start a nonprofit of her own.  

The now-president and founder of Love and Time — what she calls “the two most important four letter words in our lives” — has dedicated the nonprofit to providing timely mental health support and resources to police officers, new mothers and disenfranchised children which includes foster children, orphans and children from abusive or low-income households.

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“Our mission is to support these populations because … it’s a cycle,” Moshrefi said. “Children who are growing up in unloving, unnurturing home environments have significantly higher encounters with law enforcement … When we target these three as a whole, we can really tell a story.”

Moshrefi has been working on getting the organization up and running for a long time. Starting a year ago, she hired lawyers to get the 501(c) nonprofit status, she submitted her recognized student organization application a year ago and she raised $10,000 for the club already by hosting a piano recital charity event.  

All that work finally culminated in the club’s first meeting Feb. 8 in the Crow Center for International and Public Affairs. After a brief presentation from Moshrefi, members rearranged the room’s chairs to form a “community circle” during their first meeting last Thursday. The participants then talked about why they decided to join, where they see the organization heading in the future and what skills they can bring to the table. 

Coming out of the circle discussion, the group agreed upon three goals: recruitment, spreading the mission and fundraising — to the tune of $500,000 come the year’s end.

Moshrefi, while fiercely determined, also recognizes that if companies and groups “start off super out-of-the-box and super ambitious, [they] can fail.” She said it’s better to stick to one main goal, idea or product and show that it works before branching out. Therefore, she wants Love and Time to work on creating a telemedicine platform.  

Her plan is to build an internship program through a “memorandum of understanding,” which is an agreement between two or more parties that doesn’t involve a legal commitment,  with the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work in order to get social workers for the platform. Then, they’ll get aspiring clinical social workers to come to the platform by making their hours on Love and Time count toward their 3,000 hours of supervised volunteer work — which is required for their license to practice. Finally, Mingming Chen and Yanchen Zhou, both graduate students studying computer science, will do the coding needed to actually build the platform. 

Donya Mortazavi — a sophomore majoring in health and the human sciences as well as theater — is Moshrefi’s best friend and said she has a personal connection to this club due to her family history. 

“My mom and I, we went through a lot,” Mortazavi said. “She got the mental health [assistance] that she needed in order to raise me correctly and that’s why I’m here at USC. So, this club is very personal to me because I’m able to connect with people who need mental health awareness and promote mental health awareness.”

Coco Wang, an undeclared freshman, said her experiences in rural China — where she mentored some children with mental health problems — left her wanting to help disadvantaged people. She came into USC as a psychology major, but has since dropped the major. 

“I had a feeling of helplessness,” Wang said. “Even though I learned so many theories and therapies, I cannot do anything by just learning at school and sometimes I lost the meaning of learning psychology, so I changed my major to undeclared. When I saw this club at the club fair, I was like, ‘This reminds me of my original dream.’”

 During the circle discussion, Moshrefi revealed to the group the details of a dream she had about the club’s future.
“I actually had a dream one time that we closed the Row,” Moshrefi said. “We got permits, we closed the streets and we had a dance-a-thon. And there were like 5,000 people there, and we were all dancing for Love and Time and we raised so much money.” 

Moshrefi ended the meeting by saying they are capable of taking their mission “anywhere we want.”

“Mental health is something we take for granted,” Mortazavi said. “A lot of us are lucky enough to not have to think about [it], but it’s one of the most important things in our lives … People don’t realize how big they can dream. And to heal them, to offer help to them so they can dream that big will make the world a better place, but also get a lot of people out of bad situations and genuinely help them.”