REBOOTING MINDSETS WITH SALUBRIOUS
Unsinkable Storytelling Author: Vaishnavi Jaiswal | Innovator, Author & Changemaker
So where do we start really? Let’s rewind back to my middle school years, the most popular question that was always been there, “Vaishnavi, who do you want to be when you grow up?”
Growing up the woman who inspired me a lot was the Indian-American Astronaut ‘Kalpana Chawla’. I have always considered her as my role model and wanted to be an astronaut ‘just like her’ and looking up to her it felt safe that if she did it, I can do it too.
Fast forward to high school, I started realizing my love for coding and started acknowledging the fact that I had always been scared to dream of a career in tech because I had no one to look up to, the only names that were said aloud were of White and Asian men. I also started observing that the coding tutoring organizations in India were always gender-biased with their content, resources, and opportunities. It was like that everyone is obvious with the fact that the Tech Industry is specifically for boys. At that point I was just like, “Whoa, okay this does not feel right, nothing here feels right. I don’t know what’s going on” and what I realized was that in an area where tech is so accessible, we’re seeing these really enormous disparities in who is really accessing these opportunities.
I used the internet as my biggest tool and started looking up for #womenintech, which brought me down with the fact there are wonderful women out there making an impact but are hardly acknowledged and young girls like me who want to join this field lack support, resources and mentors, soon after I started interviewing women in the technology field and published them and that’s when “Salubrious” started initially - as a blog and soon grew into a non-profit organization with 100+ volunteers from 30+ countries and has impacted 50000+ students across the globe with our workshops, events and social media.
What we like to emphasize through our program is the idea of a STEMx narrative where we teach STEM in an applicable fashion, not a theoretical fashion to amplify the notion that STEM is a force for social good in a variety of ways regardless of what your passion is. We try to teach these basic stem concepts while tying in an aspect of social entrepreneurship & tech leadership in every program. The journey to Salubrious has immensely informed my well-being & mental health as a borderline introverted high-school student, I wasn’t the most confident public speaker or someone who is great with networking, so regardless of that I had push-out of my comfort zone, to carry out advocacy programs for Salubrious or just to make connections to with similar vision to expand the horizons of Salubrious, because the change I wanted to bring was greater than myself, I brushed off every rejection with every successful connection I made also leading to opportunities, like my first speaking gig at a State conference with 1,000+ people. I started the 1st ever youth-led organization in the city. Most of the teammates I have onboard, has met through sites such as LinkedIn which I use to expand my networks, which I describe as an “underrated” resource.Regardless of the lack of resources, opportunities and guidance for Salubrious to grow, I try to never lose hope and never lose a single opportunity to learn and grow.
As someone who has faced bullying in high school, Salubrious was also an escape from me sometimes. With some days being hard for me to survive through, Salubrious was the part of the day I always look forward to.
My passion for the work I do and dedication towards the change I want to bring with Salubrious keeps me well-informed and true to the cause and is exactly what makes me unsinkable.
I am now not scared of failures, rather I have learnt to embrace it and make the best out of it.
I’ve faced a fair amount of challenges in STEM and tech, specifically. Among them are sexism and ageism. I’ve touched upon sexism a bit in the sense that there are a lot of stereotypes about girls in technology, but also in India, there is the understanding that if you go into STEM, you become a doctor or an engineer. ENtrepreneurship, Tech Leadership, still isn’t a very popular field; it’s not as normalized in the older Indian community. With ageism, on to other hand, I’d face it when I’d go into 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 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 pitch Salubrious. 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 whether these rejections, especially since they are inevitable in the nonprofit space or in any type of founder journey. 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 15, 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 technology 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 in which 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, 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 Salubrious, ensures that the younger generations face less of a hurdle in pursuing careers regardless of the genders they used to be tied to. 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 the school or from your immediate community. Know that communities like Salubrious exist online and are here to help and support you.
Vaishnavi Jaiswal | Innovator, Author & Changemaker