Shreya Sharath is on a mission.

At age 16, she has set up a not-for-profit called GleeBoxx that, as the name implies, delivers boxes of happiness to people who might need it.

“My family is from India and my mom is from a rural village,” Sharath says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, describing how she came up with the idea.

“Whenever we visit my mom’s side of the family, we constantly see people who are asking for help and for money,” she said.

So from a young age, Sharath said, she has wanted to help. Her ultimate goal, she said, is to help people in India.

At age 13, Sharath wrote and illustrated a children’s book called “The Hidden Realm.” The main character in the book is a girl who, like herself, loves art and one day literally enters a painting.

All proceeds from Sharath’s book went to a charity based in India that, she explained soon after she published the book, “helps kids in rural India find housing and to also study until they graduate so that they can actually make a life for themselves.”

Sharath is currently writing a sequel to that book. She also makes time for dance. Her mother is a teacher of classical Indian dance and Sharath pursues that as well as ballet, jazz, and hiphop.

She decided, when it came to helping people, she “needed to start somewhere more local so I could be completely involved and just understand the process.”

As a middle-school student, Sharath was in a club that held annual drives for Joseph’s House. In her first year of high school, she asked what she could do to help at Joseph’s House.

She visited to find out and was told “a lot of people give stuff … so that’s when the idea to make it a gift really came to me,” Sharath said.

She came up with the name GleeBoxx and designed a smiley-face logo. “I really wanted the person who was receiving these boxes to feel happy immediately,” she said. She wraps each cardboard box with a ribbon and a bow so it feels “more like a gift.”

Her first drive was for the shelter program — Joseph House has locations in both Troy and Albany — at Christmastime. She filled the boxes with items like body spray, granola bars, socks, lip balm, hand cream, and deodorant.

Her next drive was for Joseph House’s supportive housing program so Sharath added items like ramen noodles and cocoa packets because the residents have access to a kitchen

“I research every best deal that I can find,” Sharath said of spending the money that is donated to the cause. “I get everything to my house and then I make all the boxes.”

The cost per box is $5 to $6, she said and the fund drives have netted between $300 to $600. A website she created — www.gleeboxx.com — has a donation page.

She was interviewed by The Enterprise on April 17 just an hour after dropped off the 47 boxes for her third drive, for the Joseph House shelter program

The program has a capacity of 47 so she assembled 47 boxes along with 11 boxes for children. For the girls, she included body scrubs and claw clips and for the boys, nerf guns.

Each box includes a note she wrote. Sharath read one to The Enterprise: “Even in difficult times, hope can be a light in darkness. Know that you are deserving of support, compassion, and a better tomorrow. Stay safe, take care of yourself, and never forget that you matter.”

The success of her project so far, she said, “completely empowers me to keep going. Whenever I’m doing work, and I want to procrastinate, this is what I do.”

Sharath has gotten support from Girls Inc. in a five-year program where she is a Eureka! girl and through that from the YWCA of the Greater Capital Region. As part of Girls Inc., she has attended summer programs at the University at Abany where she learned “different life skills.”

Sharath has learned, through building her GleeBoxx enterprise, that she loves marketing, creating a logo and “creating the brand in general,” she said, as well as learning about business management.

The Eureka! program also focuses on “college readiness,” she said. Asked about her own college plans, Sharath said, “I am shooting pretty high … I think my dream school right now is Brown and I would love to go there.”

Her next drive is for RISSE, Refugee and Immigrant Support Services of Emmaus, based in Albany.

“I’m creating 64 boxes for the kids at their after-school program,” said Sharath. “And, I hope that in future drives, I can do it with even more of the other programs.”

She also hopes that, once she assembles the boxes for RISSE, she’ll be able to meet the kids she gives them to.

Sharath said her focus is to preserve the integrity of the GleeBoxx recipients. She explained, “There are so many organizations that meet the basic needs of people who need help. But not many always focus on people being seen. And I wanted to change that.

“And that’s why I really focus on creating GleeBoxx to be a gift rather than just a donation and to put in items that make that person feel as though they were heard, feel as though they were seen, and feel loved and cared for.”

She also said, “I would have never thought GleeBoxx would be possible unless I really tried.”

Sharath concluded with this advice for others, “To every girl out there, every young person who has a dream … definitely pursue it and don’t hold back because you can do so much good in the world and you can really make a difference.”