Kavan Samant — Fall 2021 Award Recipient
Our next award recipient is Kavan Samant, a current junior at Palo Alto High School. Over the summer, he volunteered with the Boys and Girls Club, helping middle school students in East Palo Alto. Read his write up below.
Living in East Palo Alto, I have always considered myself to be a little bit more privileged than other kids who live in the neighborhood, as I get to attend schools in Palo Alto District. The poverty rate in East Palo Alto is 13.7%. One out of every 7.3 residents of East Palo Alto lives in poverty and more than one-third of students – or 1,147 children – are defined as homeless here, mostly sharing homes with other families or living in RVs and shelters. When the Pandemic hit and our lives were halted, I decided to take on tutoring Math for kids in the neighborhood. I got involved with the Peninsula Bridge Program to tutor math to elementary kids. Also during the 2021 Summer, I did an internship with the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula to help with their summer program for elementary kids. Peninsula Bridge and The Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula are both nonprofit organizations working to provide the peninsula’s low-income youth opportunities they need to achieve success in school and improve their chances of graduating from high school.
During my high school years, I have done a total of 270+ hours of volunteering with various organizations. Out of which 37 were with Peninsula Bridge and 100 hours were with The Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. I must say that tutoring and helping kids has been a very fulfilling experience for me. I have always been a shy kid but being a tutor has helped me overcome my shyness. I see myself speaking with more confidence than before and it has helped me improve my people skills as well. I also realized that when you teach someone you are also learning something new, as sometimes these kids have shown me different ways of looking at certain things. Tutoring has given me a sense of importance as my tutees look up to me and it gives me pure joy to see them get better grades in Math. I feel I also became a little bit more patient as there were some special needs kids in the summer program and we were given different training on how to work with them. I would like to end with a quote from Gerard Malanga “Do good works for others, and the good will come back to you and make you a better person.” This quote resonates with me as I feel in the last two years I have grown a different perspective on life and have become a bit more mature and tolerant.