High school students have plenty on their plates already with hours of homework a day from a range of classes—mixing in extracurricular activities and time with friends and family makes for a completely packed schedule. In addition to all this, imagine taking out extra time each day to develop educational content, train volunteers, manage social media pages, teach entire classes of students, and undertake all the other tasks necessary to run an organization.
Balancing so many responsibilities would seem daunting to anyone, but three WA sophomores—Risha Kulkarni, Sharon Lin, and Anvita Damera—have been doing just that for the entirety of this school year through their creation and management of their non-profit organization, Stem4Youth.
Stem4Youth’s primary objective is to foster an appreciation for topics related to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) among children through virtual sessions and hands-on workshops. It does so mainly through free online courses taught over Zoom on a variety of topics across the STEM field, from space exploration to data analytics to biotechnology. In addition to the courses, the team (comprised of the founders and volunteers for the organization) maintains a website on which they provide information about their mission.
“Our organization is kind of founded on this one question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?'” Stem4Youth CEO Kulkarni said. “A lot of kids have no clue […] so we want to give them an eye-opening opportunity to figure out what they want to be and what career path they want to take.”
The organization, which has grown a lot since it was founded, started from a simple idea Kulkarni had over the summer. It became something more tangible as she created a draft and introduced it to Lin, who became chief operating officer, and together they worked on researching and creating the website. As their organization picked up and the amount of work grew, they recruited Damera as another chief operating officer to help handle it all.
“When you’re first starting an organization, you want to set a good intention for it,” Lin said. “Ours was to reach more communities and have more people be able to explore the STEM field.”
Stem4Youth’s mission is all the more critical in the modern day, as the STEM field is rapidly growing and playing an increasingly major role in society. This is why many of the decisions the Stem4Youth founders have made, such as making their classes free and virtual, are based on the goal of making STEM education as accessible as possible for everyone.
“Stem4Youth was created to give accessible STEM education to all the kids we teach,” Kulkarni said. “We teach a wide variety of courses. These are all tailored to the kids and we want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to join these classes, and this is why our classes are free.”
On their website, the founders go into further detail about the experiences they had with STEM early in their lives. They developed interest in the field which they were unable to pursue throughout middle school for a variety of reasons, and this has greatly shaped their perspectives.
“An obstacle that we personally experienced was COVID. During that time […] our opportunities were limited,” Damera said. “We want kids younger than us to feel like they have the opportunity to do what they want to do.”
Although it is one of their focuses, Stem4Youth is not aimed solely at students who are interested in pursuing jobs in STEM. The founders hope to help children develop other skills that can help them in life regardless of their career path.
“Even if the kids have no clue […] what field they want to pursue, I think it just gives them a great opportunity to get some learning in,” Kulkarni said. “[They can] get some more participation, get comfortable working with teams and build leadership skills that are also super important going forward in life.”
Stem4Youth has already seen a great deal of success with regards to reaching a lot of people, as in just the four months since conceptualizing their program and publishing their website, they have already reached around five thousand students, recruited numerous volunteers to help run various aspects of the organization, attended an outreach event at WestFest, and even had workshops internationally, in India.
“Nothing will take off from the beginning. We’ve put in countless hours of work every single day just to get maybe one extra person to join the class,” Kulkarni said. “But as you start to grow, you start to realize how much the time and effort you put in has paid off.”
All of this growth is the result of immeasurable commitment from the entire Stem4Youth team, including lots of behind-the-scenes work that involves volunteers, like social media management, web development, and content management. The founders have the added responsibilities of directing the different departments, sending out emails to classes, and being at the forefront of teaching.
The Stem4Youth founders have pushed through many challenges, and are proud of having created an organization that has already achieved so much and helped so many students. They look forward to what the future holds and hope to keep educating students for years to come.
“This organization will always be like our little baby,” Kulkarni said. “It’s going to be a passion throughout college, throughout maybe the rest of our lives, that we’ll keep putting time into, money into, effort into. I think it’s just something that [we] really enjoy, and we wouldn’t be here sticking with it otherwise.”
