FRC Robotics team helps bring education to underprivileged girls in rural India

Senior outreach lead Ameya Saund’s painting for the fundraising event’s art auction shows multiple hands to highlight how collective action can accomplish much more than a sole actor.

This year, the team is preparing to present at the fundraising event organized by Shadhika, a nonprofit organization working to alleviate the burdens of poverty and gender discrimination for girls in rural India, fundraising event on UNICEF’s “Day of the Girl.”

The Mechanical Science and Engineering Team’s (MSET) First Robotics Competition (FRC) team sent three student representatives — senior outreach lead Ameya Saund and juniors Sameera Kapur and Beverly Xu — to Shadhika’s “Day of the Girl” event in Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Community Center on Oct. 14 to deliver stories of girls in India whom Shadhika has made an impact on.

Shadhika is a nonprofit organization that aims to provide education and other opportunities to girls disenfranchised by gender discrimination and poverty in rural India early on. According to the Pew Research Center, 80% of the population of India believes that, when jobs are limited, men should be given preference.

Shadhika provides full scholarships — tuition, tutoring fees and living stipends — along with funding for feminist research and grassroots leadership and education. For the past two years, the MSET FRC outreach team has been making videos for the program that help teach English.

Class of 2022 alumna Kaasha Minocha, the former lead of FRC’s outreach subsystem, initiated MSET’s branch Shadhika initiative in 2021. She discovered Shadhika through Vikalp, an organization focused on eradicating child marriage in India through education that the FRC team already had a partnership with.

Outreach is an integral part of FIRST Robotics and MSET, as it furthers FIRST’s mission to “inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators.” Currently, there are over 15 other outreach initiatives run by robotics students. These include mentoring elementary school robotics teams and building specialized mini-cars for children with limited mobility.

Saund, a member of the Shadhika team, has been helping with Shadhika since the beginning of this summer. She doesn’t often get to see the results of her efforts, but on occasion, FRC receives videos from girls who learned English from their curriculum.

“One video was of a girl speaking English, who, in the beginning, couldn’t speak a word,” Saund said. ”So it was just really impactful, because it showed us how the videos we make could impact a person’s life, and that we could teach someone a language that could be really helpful for them in the future, or if they’re trying to get a job anywhere in India.”

For the first time this year, the team has chosen to participate in the “Day of the Girl” event, celebrating UNICEF’s “Day of the Girl,” with a cocktail reception, dinner, a guest speech by poet and philanthropist Puja Shah and orations by Bay Area female students.

As one of three MSET representatives, Saund not only recorded a speech delivering one of Shadhika’s scholarship winners’ stories — one of perseverance to pursue education — but also brought artwork by the school’s art students for Shadhika to auction and raise money with.

For art pieces in the auction, Shadhika provides students with a few prompts and art references from different scholars in India — but the rest is up to students’ interpretation.

For example, Saund painted a small canvas with two fists overlapping each other, with the word “ACTION” in the background, to represent how collective action is impactful.

“It’s really impactful to see how we can change lives, with education, using the opportunities provided to us,” Saund said.