Belonging to a city that is not visible on a map, yet famous because it’s near Varanasi, has always been a problem for me for not being recognized by work. I’m a teen changemaker who founded The Animal Patronage when I was a tenth-grade student at Kids Kingdom senior secondary school, in Uttar Pradesh. Now, at 17, I’m gearing up to write my twelfth-grade exams and carving out my own path as an entrepreneur, like Steve Jobs and Ratan Tata, my two big inspirations. I won the Global Kids Achievers’ Award 2022 and was named a Harvard Innovation Fellow that same year. In the summer of 2022, I gave my first TEDx in Chennai IT. My work has been recognized by the President George W Bush Foundation Points of Light Inspirational Honor Roll 2022.

It’s been eight years that I have been working for animals with my mother in my locality. The pandemic cut us off from the rest of the world and put us into our homes. It was during this time that I started my organization for animals, to spread awareness through social media. My organization The Animal Patronage is a youth-led organisation that works for animal welfare. The organization focuses on becoming the voice of the animals to fight for their rights and protect them from human cruelties or becoming extinct. It is a global nonprofit organization based in India that aims to educate, inspire, and empower youth to work for those who can’t speak for their rights and to make a difference in society.

We started in 2021, and since then, we hosted The Animal Patronage Podcast for and by students. Besides our frequent pop-ups that aim to empower young youth by providing inspiration and ways to work for the Environment, we also bring awareness posters and digital literacy workshops to marginalized communities with little-to-no access to animal welfare.

I used the internet as my biggest tool and started looking up #animlwelfare, which lead to me knowing that there are wonderful people out there making an impact but are hardly acknowledged. Young youths like me who want to join this field lack support, resources, and mentors. Soon after I started interviewing changemakers in the SDG and environment field, and published them, was when “The Animal Patronage” started. Initially, as a podcast, it soon grew into a non-profit organization with 18+ collaborations with different organizations and one prominent one with the Crimson Youth Entrepreneurship Society by Harvard University.

I never thought of being an entrepreneur though. Moreover, it is not my preferred career either. But donning the role of a ‘Social Entrepreneur’, I want to help these speechless beings who can’t stand up for their rights. My journey as a social entrepreneur has been more than a half year. Through this time, I met thousands of people and learned about their journeys. I did many workshops and events and went on to spread awareness about how to prevent animal cruelties and extinction.

While I admittedly have no idea where I will be in 5 or 10 years from now, I do know what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. It feels like a bold statement to be saying that at 17, but I truly feel that I mean it. While I can’t draw out a roadmap or detail the concrete milestones that I want to reach, I know what future I want to work towards: One where every single youth, regardless of gender and socioeconomic status, can use social work to make a difference in society. It sounds like a far-away goal to many, maybe a dream even. But with the work my team and I do every day, I feel like that future gets closer every day to being a reality.

I envision a world where it doesn’t matter what background you come from or what you look like. Everyone is treated equally. I imagine people working together, sitting across from each other and there is a diverse set of skills, a diverse set of backgrounds. People from all different socioeconomic levels, people of different sexualities, and people of different ethnic backgrounds all come together to solve the problem that our society faces.

I hope that the work that we’re doing for The Animal Patronage ensures that the next generations face less of a hurdle due to environmental issues, regardless of the places they live. With that said, I know we have no right to kill those that are speechless. They are the ones who came before us. Our past generation made many mistakes that damaged the environment but we still have time to stop those mistakes and start preserving our planet for our upcoming generations.

I’ve faced a fair amount of challenges in social entrepreneurship. The biggest challenge I faced was other people’s opinions of doing these things at a young age. They often told me not to do this kind of thing but instead to focus more on academics. I’ve touched upon sexism in the sense that there are a lot of stereotypes about girls in social work. In India, there is the understanding that if you go into social work, you do not have an academic background.

Social Entrepreneurship still isn’t a very popular field; it’s not normalized in the older Indian community. I have faced ageism when I went to conferences or meeting rooms and I’d be the youngest person there by 10-20 years. I faced it when people joked, “Oh, shouldn’t you be in school right now?” I faced it when people turned down partnership proposals because they didn’t want to work with youth groups. Very early on, as a tenth grader, I had to develop a thick skin and choose to, in a very Taylor Swift fashion, shake it off. I’d keep going to events and create opportunities to be heard by asking insightful questions during talks and not be afraid to approach strangers to elevator my pitch for The Animal Patronage. I brushed off every rejection and every successful connection I made led to opportunities.

All of those struggles stung at first, but I think they made me, as cheesy as it sounds, a stronger person because I’ve been able to weather these rejections. Especially since they are inevitable in the nonprofit space or in any type of founder journey.

“My interests? Oh, photography, drawing, painting, reading and writing, entrepreneurship. I have my own Podcast. I can rattle a long list of hobbies without pause. Evidently, I like to explore new things, from basketball to badminton, I have tried them all. My desire for discovery is constant, even if I don’t always excel at everything I do. It’s all part of the journey of self-awareness.

In my mind, understanding the self is the most important part of all.

With that said, I know that pursuing male-dominated fields could be a hard task, and you might not receive a lot of support from school or from your immediate community. Know that communities like The Animal Patronage exist online and are here to help and support you in case you need resources or people to bond with. Communities are there, all you need to do is look them up and find them. Lastly, in my opinion, every species has an equal birthright on this planet. Just because they can’t fight for their rights doesn’t mean we cannot do that. I believe that we should try to be a ‘constructor’ and not a ‘destructor’.