Teen Spotlight: Making a Difference
High schoolers around metro Atlanta are still serving their communities during a challenging time. Khabar brings the fourth edition of this series highlighting their work.
Davita Verma
Many students in Georgia and India alike have been struggling to buy educational supplies. Thanks to the efforts of teens like Davita Verma, a senior at Alpharetta High School, these disadvantaged students are one step closer to getting the quality education they deserve.
Davita (L) helps with school supplies.
On a visit to India four years ago, Davita came across the disparities in the quality of education for wealthy students versus impoverished students,many of whom could not afford to pay for books or uniforms and relied on free supplies programs. “I researched to find out if this was specifically a problem in the U.S. and I was surprised to find out that this was even a problem in Alpharetta, Georgia. My eyes opened up,” Davita recalled in an interview with Khabar. “I had just been so closed off from that aspect of our world. That’s when I collected the stuff that I had in my bedroom, and I ended up having five pounds of school supplies. I decided to give this to a foster care support foundation and that was my first donation. I got to thinking that if I had five pounds of supplies in just my house, how much could there be in just one neighborhood and that’s when Pencils for Success was born.”
Pencils for Success is Davita’s 501(c)3 nonprofit, which collects school supplies and donates them to students in metro Atlanta and India with a focus on schools in which the majority of students are considered low-income. In 2020 alone, Pencils for Success donated over 900 pounds of supplies (275 prep books and 5,500 individual supplies) and supported more than 5,000 students in 25 schools. Davita and her team’s service at Pencils for Success has led the Global Forum for Education and Learning to declare her one of the Top 100 Visionaries in Education and has attracted the attention of Representative Lucy McBath who said, “I’m proud of this young leader and all the hard work she’s doing!”
Even the pandemic has not halted the good work of Davita. When schools and libraries shut down as students began preparing for AP exams, she and her team collected AP, SAT, and ACT prep books to donate to high school students who could not afford to buy prep books or checkout textbooks to study. To show their support for the healthcare workers on the frontlines of the fight against Covid- 19, the Pencils for Success team wrote thank you cards, partnered with local companies to arrange cookie deliveries, and donated bracelets with encouraging messages to four hospitals. “We were making sure that we were looking at our own community’s needs, instead of focusing on the fact that we’re a nonprofit for education,” Davita explained.
Pencils for Success has further opened teen-led chapters in Kansas and Texas, which have donated 200 pounds of supplies to 15 schools and formed corporate partnerships. Davita shared her plans to continue expanding her reach saying, “This isn’t just a need in Atlanta, Georgia, this is a need in every country and every city around the country. I think our chapters have been very successful. I would love for people to reach out to me and tell me that they want to start a chapter. I hope that in the next couple of years we have a chapter in every state around the country.”
Kruthik Ravikanti
Innovative teens who are starting their own service projects are finding that funding and official recognition are proving to be seemingly insurmountable challenges to their good work. And so, Kruthik Ravikanti, a senior at Alpharetta High School, is leading the charge to remove this obstacle through his own nonprofit Georgia Youth Leaders (GYL).
Kruthik’s foray into the world of service began after a trip to India where he noticed that many students did not have essential educational resources such as books or school supplies. With the guidance of Giving Point’s Social Innovators Academy and the support of his friends, Kruthik started Seeds of Literature, his own project to meet the needs of these disadvantaged students.
Seeds of Literature collects books, which it donates to foster care centers and underserved international schools. As his service was recognized, he was Congressional Award Gold Medalist in 2020.
It is however the challenges that he faced in starting his own service project which proved to be far more valuable for him. “You can only get resources like funding and volunteers through becoming a 501(c)3 organization,” Kruthik explained. “To get 501(c)3 status, a lawyer costs around $700 to $1000. I knew of about 10 service projects at that time and using $10,000 to get 10 nonprofit statuses just to do some good for the community is bizarre. So, Georgia Youth Leaders was born.”
GYL is the 501(c)3 nonprofit that Kruthik co-founded, which helps other teens start and fund their own service projects. It acts as a parent company that uses its official nonprofit status to take service projects under its wings and help them apply for grants. Currently, the eight teen-led daughter organizations that fall underGYL’s umbrella include Seeds of Literature, Clean Up Crew of Decatur, Unchained, Rising STEM, PROFFY, Little Hands of Georgia, Talk with Tech, and Global Relief. These tackle wide ranging issues from providing disaster relief and stopping sex trafficking.
Kruthik works with other volunteers.
Kruthik has certainly made good on his promise to provide these daughter organizations with much needed funding as GYL has recently provided a few of its organizations with Hershey’s Grant and has partnered with an inter-national organization that is offering $250 to each service project along with mentorship opportunities for the teens running them.
Even the Covid-19 has failed to stall the GYL team’s efforts to serve their community. “Interestingly enough, GYL was born during Covid,” Kruthik said. “We always thought Covid would be an obstacle and we wouldn’t get that many projects done, but we used safety measures. Clean Up Decatur, one of our daughter organizations, has held nearly 67 cleanups so far during Covid. Jaylin, who leads that service project, has a lot of support from her community, parents, and friends who help her with cleanups. If you have an inclusive member base you can do a lot of stuff even during Covid even though it presents a lot of obstacles.”
The Prudential Spirit of Community Awards committee recognized Kruthik’s work by declaring him an Honoree for Georgia. The support has encouraged Kruthik who shared his plans for expanding GYL saying, “We have always thought about helping the youth as the most important factor. My goal is to extend GYL to be a national nonprofit.”
Kruthik intends to continue his mission of empowering fellow teens. “Investing in the youth is one of the best decisions I have made,” Kruthik stated. “ I will be heading towards college and I still will be looking at this college group from 13 to 18, mostly high schoolers, who have the initiative to start something.”
Bhavana Kunnath, a senior at Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, is the editor-in-chief of Infinitas, the school’s literary magazine. She is currently an intern with Khabar magazine, and can be reached at kunnathbhavana@gmail.com. To comment on this article, please write to letters@khabar.com.
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