Samay Sikri is the sort of West San Jose 17-year-old who likes to walk his labradoodle and is looking forward to the endless possibilities that come with the approaching end of high school.
But, alongside friend Arnav Kodavati from Monte Sereno (who was still 16 when he spoke with the Los Gatan), he’s also growing a multi-state organization, called LIFT, that provides at-risk youth with practical skills, like financial literacy.
They’ve already teamed-up with well-known entities such as San Jose Job Corps, the Bill Wilson Center, the San Jose Downtown Youth Wellness Center, Allcove San José, Unity Care and more, with the goal of transforming the lives of youth in the community.
And now, they’ve filed the paperwork to begin formalizing their initiatives into a proper nonprofit.
“What we do is we pretty much work with these different centers and places, and we provide workshops,” Sikri said, explaining how they try to gamify learning in a helpful way. “We have activities for any topic that we’re teaching.”
This “enjoyable and educational” model was inspired by something that happened back when Sikri was in 9th Grade.
“Four years ago, my freshman year, one of my mentors was arrested in the middle of class,” he said. “He spent a couple months fighting the case in the juvenile justice system.”
According to Sikri, the friend, who was a junior, was ultimately acquitted, but both of them got a rude awakening about the reality of America’s youth corrections landscape.
“It was really scary for him,” Sikri said.
Meanwhile, one of his mom’s close friends was fostering two boys, he recalled.
Compared to the education he was getting at Lynbrook High School, it seemed, to Sikri, those boys weren’t getting much support from the foster care system, at least as far as life skills went.
“This got me thinking,” he said, relating how he confronted his own privilege after realizing many other kids don’t get the same amount of instruction about how to be self-sufficient. “The hard truth is, it doesn’t really happen in a lot of places. And that’s the rough part.
“It got me a little sad, at first. I was like, all these kids they don’t have the opportunities that other people have.”
He was starting to understand how some of his peers had grown up in quite an unstable environment.
“That’s what prompted me to start LIFT,” he said, explaining the name stands for Lead and Inspire Future Transformation. “We work with places that work with at-risk youth.”
For example, if they’re holding a workshop on investing, they’ll use props like bins and a basketball; to teach investing, they’ll hand out jellybeans and ask about how many to allocate to different things; they’ll turn job interview practice into a game; and to educate about the credit system, they might just invoke Drake or Taylor Swift.
“It could be a boring lecture or a dry handout,” Sikri said. “There’s very few resources that actually engage students and get them to have fun while learning.”
Kodavati, who’s a year younger than him, has been named CFO of the organization.
He recalls a workforce training session they organized a few weeks ago where they demonstrated how easy it would be to create a business website using new AI tools.
“I was leading the workshop that day,” he said. “It was really cool to see how they reacted to seeing the website being built before their eyes.”
Kodavati, who also attends Lynbrook, says the idea is to help to break the cycle of poverty.
“If they don’t have the money, they can’t get the education to break out of the cycle,” he said.
Last year they began to seriously expand their project, and now count chapters in Texas, Washington State and Georg.
“And then we have a couple more starting up in New Hampshire, Connecticut and New York this coming year,” Sikri said. “Our impact just keeps on increasing.”
They’ve officially begun the registration process with the State of California. Next, will be to achieve 501(c)3 “charity” status.
And they’re hoping to establish their own scholarship fund in the future.
For more info: lift-co.org
