Emily Bhatnagar was 17 years old, it was one in the morning, and she was terrified to hit post.
She had been caring for her father, who was battling stage four thyroid cancer, for two years by then. Books had gotten her through it — the long hospital waits, the uncertainty, the particular exhaustion of being a teenager whose life had pivoted into something no teenager should have to carry. She wanted to share that comfort with other kids in similar situations, so she'd decided to ask her neighbors in Gaithersburg, Maryland for gently used children's books to donate to pediatric patients. Simple enough idea. Except Emily had struggled with severe social anxiety her entire life, and putting herself out there — even online, even anonymously — felt enormous.
She posted under a fake name. Emily Ayana, not Emily Bhatnagar. And then she went to sleep, expecting maybe two or three people to respond.
She woke up to a phone that wouldn't stop buzzing.
"I truly expected maybe two or three people would donate some old, used books," she said. "I woke up to a phone that was absolutely flooding with messages from my neighbors."
What followed was a summer Emily still talks about. She and her brothers drove house to house across their neighborhood, meeting strangers who had been living a mile away their whole lives. People weren't just handing over books — they were handing over pieces of family history. Books from 1985 with handwritten inscriptions. Notes tucked inside from parents who had once read the same stories to their own kids. "We realized these weren't just donations," Emily said. "They were pieces of people's lives being passed on to help a child in a hospital bed."
That first wave of generosity became the foundation of For Love & Buttercup, which has now donated over 30,000 books to pediatric hospitals across the country. Emily has been covered by CNN Heroes, Good Morning America, the Today show, The Washington Post, Forbes, and CBS. She's 22, studying at Penn, still caring for family, and now working with a literary agent on a memoir. The nonprofit she built from a late-night post on a community app has taken on a life she couldn't have imagined when she was too anxious to post under her real name.
She uses her real name now.
That shift is something Emily credits, in part, to Nextdoor. "Nextdoor was quite literally the only tool that ever worked in helping me open up," she said. "Something I had been desperately trying to do for 15 years." The platform gave her a contained, local space to take a risk — neighbors, not the whole internet, not strangers from everywhere. Just the people on her street and the ones a few blocks over. For someone for whom social anxiety had been a genuine barrier to connection, that specificity mattered.
"Nextdoor is where my roots are," she said. "It was the catalyst that turned a small local project into a national movement."
Emily's inbox is now full of young people asking how she did it — teenagers who want to start something in their own communities and don't know where to begin. Her answer is consistent: start small, start local, and don't wait until you have everything figured out. A single post asking a genuine question of your actual neighbors is a real starting point. She knows because she lived it.
"Anyone who says you can't change the world is wrong," Emily said. "It starts with one person making a difference, and then another."
She just happened to be that person at 1 AM, a little scared, posting under a different name — and everything grew from there.
For Love & Buttercup accepts book donations through their Nextdoor group and website at forloveandbuttercup.com. You can also follow along and reach Emily directly on Instagram at @forloveandbuttercup.