Yo, it’s your boy JC back again with another blog post. This week, we put the founder of S4V on the spot and interviewed her about some of her interests and the start of S4V.

Anjali Gupta was born in Edison, New Jersey. She spent her entire childhood there before moving to North Carolina when she started college at Duke University. Ever since she was a child, her grandfather had always reminded her of the importance of education. At that time, she didn’t understand why he constantly talked about it, but later learned that her grandfather grew up in a community in India that did not have a school. Luckily, her grandfather was able to attend school elsewhere, but that was not an option available to the other children. It was this education that he credited for his ability to overcome many of the obstacles that he was born into.

When Anjali was in elementary school, her grandfather started building a school in his childhood community in India. As a mathematics professor, education was his mission… his purpose. As Anjali grew up, she wanted to contribute to his mission, even after he eventually passed away. She recognized a major gap at her grandfather’s school – the Indian national curriculum includes lab experiments yet students were skipping large portions of it simply due to a lack of resources. This made her consider what high-quality education means in the 21st century. To do her part in addressing this problem, Anjali started with small events. Two garage sales were done, and each raised under $200. Even though $400 was barely enough to make much of an impact, Anjali was still super excited. Garage sales evolved into more elaborate events, including a dinner banquet, which Miss New Jersey 2017, Chhavi Verg, personally attended. It took two years for School for a Village to raise its first $10,000, and the organization was finally able to provide her grandfather’s school with three science laboratories – mission success! In 2018, Anjali was invited to New York for the Just Peace Summit held by the We Are Family Foundation as a Global Teen Leader, where she met Jefferson, our COO. The two started to collaborate, and S4V expanded to Kenya as a result.

It took a lot of perseverance and determination for Anjali to bring the organization to where it is today. The first two years brought obstacles after obstacles. At first, people questioned whether the money they would donate was going to go anywhere, and Anjali didn’t yet have the evidence to establish credibility. Another challenge was the fact that School for a Village did not have an on-ground team in its early years. Although Anjali was working with local leaders in India, no one could oversee operations on a day-to-day basis. This brought a variety of logistical problems, for example, the laboratories built in S4V’s first project were not in the most ideal locations within the school. It was difficult to address this without an on-ground team. However, these early challenges taught Anjali a lot. She learned how to set a strategy and develop a vision for the organization. She also learned to be thoughtful in navigating limited resources and establishing credibility, and intentional about building connections around the world to sustain and amplify our work.

Anjali loves hearing from students and teachers at the schools that S4V works with. Hearing from them reminds her that working alongside students and implementing solutions suited to each school’s specific needs does indeed make a difference. School for a Village is not a massive organization, but it is these interactions that truly keep Anjali going. S4V has given Anjali the perfect outlet to not only learn about the world, but to also find ways to tangibly bridge some of the inequalities that she sees. Anjali wishes to spend her life working towards bridging some of these disparities. Outside of S4V, she spent a summer working as a Freedom School Servant Leader Intern in Tarboro, NC, where she taught 12 elementary school students whose needs were not being adequately met by their educational systems. Many of these students came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and several had experienced a lot of childhood trauma. This experience was a difficult one, but also an impactful one for her as it redefined the way Anjali thinks about education. Anjali envisions a world in which schools are much more than simply educational institutions – rather, they are support structures for students. She notes that poor health outcomes are often associated with poor education outcomes. Effective interventions during schooling can help address poor outcomes in both categories. 

Being the CEO of a nonprofit organization and a full-time student does not allow for much free time, but when she does have free time, she likes to play tennis and spent time with her friends. She also loves going on bike rides… especially long bike rides. Anjali’s dream bike ride would be on a canopied trail in the woods. 

As an organization that focuses on STEM education, it would be wrong if we didn’t ask Anjali about her favorite STEM courses. At the moment, her favorite would have to be statistics. Statistics helps her in her epidemiology research as it provides her with a method of understanding the relationships between different factors in a quantifiable manner. Her favorite class before statistics, however, was organic chemistry (yuck). She claims that organic chemistry was filled with a lot of puzzles, which was something that she enjoyed, and something that I have to respectfully disagree with. Her favorite food is chili paneer, but it has to be from this one restaurant called Ming in New Jersey (I didn’t know that Yao Ming started a restaurant…Haha).

The fictional character that Anjali admires the most is Anne from Anne of Green Gables because of how free-spirited she is. In the book, Anne is never tied down negatively by tradition and is way ahead of her time. If there is one quote that Anjali lives by, it would have to be “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor and some style,” by Maya Angelou. Anjali wants to live life with purpose, kindness, and love for the people around her. Of course… she also wants to have fun while doing it.

Annnddd that’s the end of our fourth blog post. I hope you learned something about Anjali by the end of the post, and keep an eye out for our next one!