We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gargi Patel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gargi below.

Gargi, appreciate you joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

Inspire Curiosity is a non-profit organization aimed toward providing STEM education to kids. This was started during COVID and began with 2-3 kids joining our classes via zoom. Since then we have been able to expand to over 25 chapters and locations around the world impacting more than 5000 kids globally.

An important lesson that can be learnt through this journey is to never give up. Our growth can be attributed to many aspects such as social media, corporate connections, and more. The start of our growth came from local libraries, they were able to help up expand by providing us a way to reach out to more people, hanging up flyers and telling local visitors about our classes. As we began to expand and gain more students, we started our social media journey posting about our work and events and having it spread through students parents to reach even more people. Our biggest contributor came through corporate connections we were able to make. As we were able to grow we were given the opportunity to attend conferences such as International Society for Technology in Education conference as well as present at the New Jersey Computer Science Teacher Association Conference, and the Princeton Plasma Physics labs Young Women conference. Through these we were able to connect with professionals and gain meaningful mentors who were able to guide our process and get the word out to more people about our work.

Using all these means we were able to go from a small organization impacting a few kids, to a larger organization able to make a more global impact.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

While I was not part of the founding board of the organization I was fortunately able to join early on and help both the organization and myself grow. I started off in the organization as a volunteer and was happy to be able to teach kids about STEM by helping out as needed. When I truly began to develop a passion I was able to start leading my own chapter and became one of the Co-Chapter Heads for the Northern New Jersey Chapter along with my partner Grishmaa Chaudhary. For about a year we navigated the difficulties of being chapter heads, struggling and learning new ways to increase attendance and make classes more fun and interactive. As we figured out the ins and out to a successful chapter we were happy to help expand Inspire Curiosity internationally. We started our own respective chapters in the UK, Africa, and India bringing our curriculum to new countries.

Through these years I have been able to learn the tips and strategies on how to grow and expand a chapter as well as great management skills. As I now work as the Co-COO for Inspire Curiosity I am happy to see students progress through our program and appreciate all we teach them, and am happy to be able to mentor other ambitious students through the path I once went through in leading their own successful chapters, and I hope to be able to continue my journey with the organization in a similar way, giving back to the community and leaving an impact.

Inspire Curiosity is a 501(c)(3) public charity and non-profit organization dedicated to STEM education, application, and exposure. We work to provide this through many different ways some of which include online weekly classes and in-person outreaches. Starting with our weekly classes, we offer these through our various different chapters and each one has its own time and unique topics that they cover, these run throughout the school year. We like to continue fostering curiosity even into the summer, through our Summer of STEM program where each week a different theme will be addressed.

In addition to our free online classes, we like to give back to the community in other ways as well. Some ways include hosting in-person classes at local libraries to provide fun, engaging, and educational events for children to immerse themselves in. Recently we have been lucky to receive support from Google and Microsoft in carrying out our goals. With Google we have been able to partner and give students tours of the office and learn about different tech careers. Additionally with Microsoft, we have been able to set up a mentorship program allowing for other young students to receive direct mentorship from Microsoft employees and learn about their careers and paths.

One of our proud achievements is we have been able to stick to our student led initiative motto. All of our chapters are run by students, with many being established by kids who once went through the program themselves. As these volunteers have been through our program they truly understand the work we are trying to do and are able to encompass that in their own teaching. Through this we follow our saying of being an organization for students by students. We look forward to being able to expand even further and impact more communities with our work in the future.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

One thing that helps us build our reputation is our adherence to our goals of providing fun and interactive lessons to kids. When kids join our classes they are made to feel welcome, and are taught material in an enjoying manner with the use of games, discussions and simulations. The beginning and end of classes are spent creating bonds with the kids so each kids feels welcome there and wants to come back. When parents see their kids so eager to learn and continue coming back to our lessons this makes them feel happy and they share our information with other parents and this helps build our reputation and gets kids coming back session after session.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

When managing a team it is important to keep in mind that every person is different. Everyone may not learn the same way, work the same way, or communicate the same way but in order to effectively manage a team you must be able to accommodate to each of these different settings. Trying to get someone to do something against their wish will only result in poorly done work instead finding a balance amongst the whole team is important. Another important factor is communication, without proper communication the team will be broken and will not perform to the best of it’s abilities so using online communication platforms to ensure everyone is on the same page can be recommended. To keep morale high make sure to acknowledge and celebrate achievements that occur, if a person or chapter makes an accomplishment and it is celebrated it will motivate others to do the same as well as motivate that person to do even better.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.inspirecuriosity.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inspire.curiosity/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weinspirecuriosity
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inspirecuriosity/posts/?feedView=all
• Other: Email: [email protected]