My journey through life has been guided by a fundamental belief that: every individual possesses an innate capacity for kindness. Education and learning in my view are not solo acts of acquiring knowledge but acts of collaboration and co-creation that build empathy and compassion. I've spent the last five years trying to create learning spaces that can help children reach their highest potential and bring out the empathy and compassion innate to them. When I started out I wasn't quite sure what the best way was to achieve this goal. I volunteered at five non-profits over the course of six months but something always felt amiss. I spent sometime reflecting on my own experiences and realised that the spaces where I thrived in - whether it was in my Montessori based early childhood schooling or college at Georgia Tech - were spaces that gave me agency as a learner. A few weeks into this realisation I met likeminded individuals and we decided that the fastest way to learn and understand better would be to start our own learning space. The idea was to co-create, along with the children, a joyful and democratic learning center. The hope was that collective ownership and responsibility would help children be the best versions of themselves. We identified a location and started a center. In two weeks we had two hundred children visiting the space. We were overwhelmed by the response from the community and we realised how fast we needed to adapt to keep up. In this evolving journey, we immersed ourselves in continual learning, practical application, and reflection, drawing inspiration from Paulo Freire's 'praxis' approach. Our learnings came thick and fast. We realised very quickly that seeing education in isolation is not a viable way to ensure progress. We studied systems thinking and created a systems map, to understand all the challenges faced in the community and understood how they came together. We identified where we could act to create virtuous cycles in the community. A lot of children that visited the space had experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences. They needed spaces with healthy relationships to cope with the trauma and build resilience. We made our spaces more trauma informed and changed the design of the space adding a 'Peace Room' where children can take a time out when they're distressed. We also created sharing circles so children could help and support each other. When we learned that many children felt too unclean to participate in the learning space we worked with the community to ensure water supply at our learning center so children could clean up and join the learning. The biggest learning though came when I read John Holt - "Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense". Most children simply did not know what it meant to know something. To them the universe was just a bunch of arbitrary rules that the adults shared. The children had a relationship of fear with learning and until they experienced what it meant to know something this would not change. We studied Mitchell Resnick's work and created self-evaluative learning material with sufficient scaffolding so children can explore themselves. Though we had not developed any specific assessment mechanisms we interviewed parents, teachers and children themselves and noticed that the children were thriving. It was at this point that the pandemic hit and we were forced to rethink our model and pause our experiments. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to reflect and given how we were forced to go remote, I wanted to try and create similar unstructured, self exploratory, learning spaces digitally as well. With a co-founder I launched CraterClub - a live streaming platform for designers, developers and stock traders. After raising a one million dollar seed round, we created a community of 100,000 users and we studied how people could learn by being a part of live streams where creators went about their day to day work. While we could not raise further funding and had to shut down the company, Crater gave me a glimpse of the power of technology at scale and got me thinking how I could apply technology to other learning spaces. Post the pandemic we expanded to five learning spaces serving the needs of communities that were badly affected. It was at this point that the processes, experiments and methodologies that we had been following so far stopped being so effective. Despite our best efforts, a large amount of time was spent putting out fires and solving administrative issues. The in depth efforts we had put into our first community were simply not replicable given our resources and there became a need for developing a better methodology. It is here that I came across the work of Dr. Brigid Barron's with YouthLab and how technology can be used to create more equitable opportunities. I also read Dr. Denise Pope's book "Doing School" and learnt how we can capture qualitatively children's experiences. Experimenting with my own initiative and working at the grassroots level has given me a lot of perspective and an appreciation of the challenges that marginalised communities are facing, but today I feel that rather than working in a silo I would love to work as a part of a team with the right guidance. Having stood on the shoulders of many whose work helped me find my way, I now aim to create a body of work from which others can learn. So far my work has always been in two different worlds either as a developer working on technology or as a facilitator working in education. While this has given me a unique perspective I want to synthesise my learnings and Stanford to me seems like the ideal place to marry these two worlds. I hope that working in team with the right guidance can help me develop a process to create environments where every learner can craft their own learning journey to be the best versions of themselves.