Gitanjali Rao, Suraj Kulkarni Among Winners of the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards

Gitanjali Rao, Time magazine’s first ever, ‘Kid of the Year’ is among 10 winners of the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards, chosen for their outstanding achievements in community service. Joining her is another Indian American – Suraj Kulkarni – a senior at Corvallis High School in Oregon. 

The 10 national winners were chosen from 102 state honorees, who received a $2,500 scholarship. The national winners get an additional $5,000 scholarship, a gold medallion, a crystal trophy for their nominating organization and a $5,000 grant for a nonprofit charitable organization of their choice. The awards, sponsored by Prudential Financial in partnership with NASSP, honor students in grades 5-12 for making meaningful contributions to their communities through volunteer service.

Gitanjali Rao, 15, of Lone Tree, Colorado, a sophomore at STEM School Highlands Ranch, has reached more than 30,000 students around the world, encouraging younger generations to think creatively about confronting the world’s big challenges by leading online workshops where she shares the unique problem-solving methodology she created. 

A celebrated scientist, Rao has invented devices to detect lead in water and diagnose opioid addiction. She also has pioneered technology to discourage cyber bullying. While working on these projects, she came up with her own process for guiding an idea from concept to reality. She started sharing this process with elementary students at her school, and received such positive feedback from the kids, parents and teachers that she realized she could take it to students beyond her school “to inspire them to create their own creative solutions to world problems,” she said. 

She organized her process into an easy-to-understand format, documented it, and created a workshop curriculum with lesson plans and resources for research labs, contests and mentorships. Then she began working with schools, after-school camps, gifted-student programs, girls’ STEM groups, and eventually, international organizations to hold workshops for students around the world. She currently holds two to three sessions a week, each attended by about 150 students. “The vision is to introduce innovation tools and techniques earlier in our education, so that everybody is thinking about using science as a catalyst for social impact and change,” she said.

Suraj Kulkarni, 18, of Corvallis, Oregon, a senior at Corvallis High School, created a website where young people of diverse backgrounds can share their experiences, perspectives and culture with one another, along with online conferences that have involved young people from more than 13 countries. 

As an Indian American, Kulkarni had to get used to schoolmates joking about his name, making fun of his lunch food, and humiliating him in other ways because of his background. As a result, “I felt ashamed of my own culture and heritage,” he says. When the Black Lives Matter movement brought topics of race and discrimination to the forefront last year, he felt the need to provide all teens who identify as minorities with a platform to talk comfortably about their cultures, their unique struggles and experiences with prejudice, and to understand that all of their individual qualities matter. 

He recruited a half-dozen friends to help him set up a website  and begin writing and publishing posts on the site, which now features more than 20 articles by minority students plus interviews with notable minority public figures. 

Kulkarni and his team also established a presence on Instagram, and started hosting online awareness conferences to connect students all over the world. In addition, he organized an “Awareness and Acceptance Week” in his hometown of Corvallis, during which hundreds of students watched videos of minority teens discussing prejudice and ways to counter systemic discrimination. “Especially in today’s climate, it’s so important to be understanding of each other’s struggles,” he said.