About Us
Sarthak Mentoring Program is a Life Skills mentorship program which is aimed at building the creators for the world future.
The program helps shape the lives of children from remote areas of the country and bond them with responsible and knowledgeable people from across the world to mentor the children through a structured mentoring curriculum.
A volunteer-run and volunteer-propelled mentoring program, Sarthak has been working to empower the future leaders of India since 2017. Since 2017, the Sarthak program has empowered the lives of 90+ young people from 4 States in India.
The Mentoring Program is designed to fill the gap in the soft skills and knowledge exposure for the young students hailing from remote towns and villages of the country. The program structure is designed to provide the right guidance to the vulnerable young students from these places, empower them with the skills training accessible otherwise only to privileged few in the major cities.
Sarthak program has empowered young people from Ladakh to Assam, Bihar to Haryana and continues to work to bridge the gap of lottery of birth.
Sarthak program is powered by exceptional individuals from across the country and beyond who are committed to acting to bring the change that they aspire to see. These motivated individuals are the mentors, we call them Saarthi. A term derived from the Bhagwad Geeta for the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna in the great battle of Mahabharata.
Mentees are the young aspiring adults from the core of India who is going to shape India’s future. Mentees are selected through a rigorous selection process and background checks to ensure that we work with young people who need support and are ready to go the extra mile. The kids in the program are aged between 9-16 years ago.
Mentors are professionals and motivated individuals who have achieved success in their lives and are in continuous pursuit to make the world a better place. The mentor selection is based on peer-reviewed background checks and 2 rounds of interviews. Since 2017, we have worked with 50+ mentors from 21 Indians states and 5 countries (India, Romania, Australia, Italy, and Norway).
Our Story
The ideation of the Sarthak Mentoring program dates back to 2013 when Abhijeet, the Founder and Managing Director of the Sarthak Mentoring Program, felt the knowledge gap between the cities and smaller towns/villages was broadening at a massive rate. From 2013 to 2017, Abhijeet delivered 15 life and career coaching talks across 12 Indian cities reaching up to 5000 young students from 5 states. While his talks were focused on guiding the younger generation to the ocean of opportunities ahead and motivating them to pursue dreams, he found a trend in the feedback received from the students.
The feedback resembled a story similar to his: where he missed a personal role model in his student life, someone to reach out to, someone who can help discover your talent, someone who can advise taking future steps without being judgemental, someone who had walked the same path before and someone who can inspire to awesome self we were supposed to be. While schools focussed on education several coaching institutions organized post-school classes but there was a handful in cities almost none in smaller towns that focussed on soft skills and personality development classes. Though there was a handful in most cities, there were almost none in smaller towns.
Abhijeet decided early in 2017 to take a firm step to fill this ever-broadening gap. He wanted to put into execution the ideas he had conceived for empowering the future warriors of India. With this mission, he formed a formal nonprofit organization called Aanandam Society for Sustainable Development (AASD). Sarthak mentoring program ran as the fall-through project under AASD until 2020. In 2020, considering the far-reaching impact that Sarthak had created across the country, Sarthak Mentoring Foundation was formed to overtake all operations of the program under its window.
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However, it was only in November 2017 that Sarthak Mentoring Program was officially started with the aim to fuel the dreams of children irrespective of their place, religion, or time of birth, when Abhijeet met Nishitha Boda, a colleague at Schlumberger, in a business meeting in Pune. Nishitha believed in the overall Sarthak project and she immediately partnered with Abhijeet to kick it off. Ever since then, both Nishitha and Abhijeet have never looked back and continue to work to build the future of India through Sarthak Mentoring Program. Abhijeet and Nishitha were joined by Chuskit Angmo in 2020 to further bolster the vision of Sarthak. Chuskit is a change agent leader from Ladakh and adds to the agility and passion of the program founders.
The journey, impact, and story of Sarthak can be viewed in this infographic:
Abhijeet Anand
Founder and Managing Director
Abhijeet is the Founder and Managing Director of the program. Sarthak Mentoring Foundation is his brainchild and he envisions to help enable every individual to harness its own potential using self-exploration, productivity hacks, and guided learning.
Nishitha Boda
Co-founder and Director, Performance
Nishitha Boda is the Co-Founder and Program Director for Sarthak Mentoring Program. She believes in making a change by joining hands to foster the younger generation and ourselves. She is passionate to take real grass root level actions to empower the rising generation for a brighter future for all.
Chuskit Angmo
Director, Learning
Chuskit Angmo from Ladakh, is Director of Learning at Sarthak. She has done her Masters in Zoology from Delhi University. Her mission is to create a humane society through empathetic listening and safe sharing space. She believes that every individual has the potential to expand oneself and inspire others. Her vision is to have a world of individuals who are being inspired from within, ready to listen to the ‘other’ and value the innate compassionate nature of humanity.Â
Chuskit has been working voluntarily with Initiatives of Change (IofC), India since 2017 as a group facilitator and is also involved with Institute for Faith-based Diplomacy (IFBD) as one of the cell members from Ladakh. Her passion is to keep learning and upgrading herself. She loves to dance, read, travel, write and spend time with her inner self and connect within.