Shruthi Solaiappan - Founder and Volunteer at L.E.A.P
Shruthi is a 17 year old student at Chantilly High School in Chantilly, Virginia. Being someone who has been to a total of 8 schools throughout her life, Shruthi loves to meet new people and has a great appreciation for people of different backgrounds. This enables her to sympathize with the situations that those who are not so fortunate are in. Shruthi is passionate about pursuing change and is looking forward to expanding L.E.A.P. to positively influence more lives in need. She is interested in computer science, business management, and social entrepreneurship. In her free time, Shruthi can be found hanging out with her friends, hiking, editing videos, traveling, or listening to her favorite music.
Organizations and Individuals that have helped us along the way
Aid India
Association for India’s Development is a volunteer movement promoting sustainable, equitable and just development. AID supports grassroots organizations in India and initiates efforts in various interconnected spheres. These include education, livelihoods, natural resources including land, water and energy, agriculture, health, women’s empowerment and social justice.
Ms. Carmen Wise
Health & Physical Education Teacher in Chantilly High. She helped with content and lesson development to teach Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR), First Aid and Automated External Defibrillation (AED). With her years of experience in teaching students at Chantilly High School such topics, her advice aided us in taking such matters across the globe.
How did L.E.A.P. come about?
For a majority of her life, Shruthi lived in India where she heard about sexual assaults, and cardiac arrests go by unnoticed. In fact, in her former school, a 1st grader was sexually abused by a school teacher. She believed that the government was doing all it could to contain such cases, but on moving to the US a couple years after, she was taught Family Life Education (General Sexual Education, CPR, and first aid treatment) in her High School. This is a concept that has not yet been introduced to many schools in India where people suffer the repercussions of sexual culture and improper medicinal resources daily. Knowing this, Shruthi became aware of how valuable what she had learned in school truly was. Realizing that such information could be life-saving to the lives of millions of underprivileged individuals in India, she took up the cause and founded Life Education for All People (L.E.A.P.).
Challenges Shruthi has faced:
Initially, Shruthi hesitated to speak about Sexual Education in front of an audience. She was only 15 years old when she began the non-profit, and the topic is heavily taboo’d in rural India. However, knowing how much her knowledge would aid the villages in India and how the conservative mindset she began with was the same as that of most of India, which is a large reason why sexual education is not being implemented in Indian school systems, Shruthi disallowed mental barriers to stop her from pursuing the change that she wanted to see in the world. In the process, Shruthi has gained confidence, public speaking skills, management skills, leadership skills, life-altering insight, and a sense of satisfaction she never thought possible. Shruthi has even expanded her organization to an online platform by which content can be easily accessed, delivered, and shared in light of the coronavirus pandemic and her physical distance from India. In fact, sharing information through short animated videos on such proactive and sensitive matters are shown to reach a larger population quicker. Shruthi hopes to serve as an inspiration not only for teachers who lack the confidence to speak up about taboo topics, but for teens around the world to use anything that they are privileged with to positively influence those who are not as privileged.