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Every Child Deserves More Than an Impossible Choice
Founder & CEO of Rice Kids, Anakh Sawhney argues education and community leadership break cycles of poverty
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Anakh Sawhney - Mon, 23, Mar 2026
- 03:44 EDT
- 14
Every person lives with dignity and equal opportunity. / Rice Kids.
My name, Anakh, means pride and dignity. My parents gave me that name with intention, and they reminded me of it often, not as a definition of who I was, but as a responsibility toward how I showed up for others.
Growing up, our family would volunteer together on weekends at local homeless shelters. I vividly remember being seven years old, holding out a sandwich and an apple to a woman sitting quietly with two small children by her side. She looked at the food, then at me, and nodded gently. That moment stayed with me for a long time.
As I grew older and continued volunteering, I started asking deeper questions, first to my parents, then to other volunteers and shelter staff who had been doing this work for years. Why were so many of the same families still here? Despite the help we provided, very little seemed to change for the people we served. Over time, I came to understand something the people around me had already wrestled with: a lack of education was one of the most significant reasons so many individuals and families found themselves trapped in these circumstances. Without it, there was no real path forward. The cycle just kept turning.
That realization became the foundation of Rice Kids. If we genuinely wanted to break the cycle, we had to address everything that kept children out of classrooms, food, yes, but also learning resources, health support, and economic pressure on families. Not just relief, but real pathways out. Today, Rice Kids operates through more than three hundred community partnerships across five U.S. states and India, supporting thousands of children daily. Half of our supported students return to mainstream education.
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What makes this work meaningful, though, is not the scale. It is what happens when communities begin to lead their own change. We do not go in with answers. We listen, we find the people who understand their neighborhoods from the inside, and we empower them to lead. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the stories of women running Rice Kids supported education centers.
One story that I carry with me is that of Babita, an education coordinator who works with our centers in Delhi and Bihar. Babita grew up in a village in Bihar where school for girls was considered unnecessary. She had studied until class ten, then life moved in a different direction - marriage, household responsibilities, and eventually moving to Delhi to work as a house help. When an education center opened in her locality, she came to see what it was about. She was inspired by women from backgrounds like hers. Within months, she was one of them. In the second year, she returned to her village, encouraged other women, and set up a center there. She now manages it remotely from Delhi, with over fifty children enrolled, and her own children, for whom quality education had once felt entirely out of reach, are now thriving in a private school she is proud of. During my last visit, she shared that what kept her committed to this work was feeling trusted and empowered, not just assisted. That is exactly what we try to build: not programs that serve communities from the outside, but ones that grow from within them.
Young people are nimble in ways that are often underestimated. They have not yet been told what is too ambitious or too complicated, so they experiment, adapt quickly, and find ways through problems that more experienced people might walk around. They also tend to listen without the weight of assumptions, and that openness turns out to be one of the most valuable things youth can bring to this kind of work.
At the heart of everything Rice Kids does is a simple belief: every child deserves to grow up with choices. Not charity. Choices. And choices open up when they have access to education.
The writer is a Founder & CEO, Rice Kids.
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad.)
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