A Conversation with the Founders of the Reach Project
We like to use our Saturday posts to feature new voices: other students of color in competitive high schools, alumni who have moved past those high schools, adults who have advice or skills to share, and finally, teens in our city who have similar goals to us. This week, we had the pleasure of meeting with two students who fall into that last category, Ashfah Alam and Tasnimul Rafid, founders of the REACH project.
In the words of Ashfah, the REACH project began because of a shared sentiment between her and Tasnimul: “We grew up in the Bronx, near Westchester and Parkchester. In that area in the Bronx there aren’t that many opportunities to try out different extracurricular activities. Later on, when we went to high school, we saw that other students had been able to have a lot of time to develop their interests and had a considerable amount of experience in different areas. They were able to pursue awards and leadership opportunities much faster than students without access to earlier extracurricular opportunities who were just beginning to learn about different skills. So I think that’s what the REACH project is really trying to fix: bringing affordable free extracurricular activities to middle schoolers in the Bronx.”
Similar to the Outsiders Guide, the REACH project largely stemmed from a desire to make the lives of younger students easier– but Ashfah and Tasnimul had two different experiences in high school that led them to creating the project. Tasnimul, who now goes to Bronx Science, says: “What REACH was to me was since I saw a lot of people who were really good at things that they had been doing since middle school and younger, I really didn’t like the feeling of being behind. That's really why I did REACH, I wanted to give kids in my community the same chance that others had. I also found a new passion when I went to high school, I started doing a lot of new things and went to a lot of clubs. I really wanted kids to be able to get that feeling before they went to high school so they don’t feel swallowed by those endless opportunities that they might find and make sure that their experiences were a lot easier than it was for me.”
Ashfah on the other hand, who goes to the private Chapin School, says, “I was with students who really had access to opportunities from Kindergarten on, so that was a whole different world for me. I think that imposter syndrome really settled in for me, maybe in a way that was a little different because for me it was not only feeling academically behind but it was also socially behind, financially behind; I felt like I wasn’t really in a place to be taken seriously. Actually, I feel like for me REACH was less of a challenge and more of an outlet because I could reconnect with other students from other schools and I had that sort of community to go back to.”
The project began in 2018, with a creative writing workshop hosted in the Tutoring center Tasnimul used to work at. “Using our community in the Bronx, we knew a lot of the people who live in the area, it was really easy to find kids who were interested in creative writing, so what we did was that we created our own original writing curriculum with our volunteers and we had a few projects. We taught them how to storyboard, how to create a story, and how to write their own poems. Then, at the end of the workshop, we had a party. They wrote their own books with their stories in it and they were able to present them to their families and friends. That was our first start up curriculum and now we’re creating many more.”
Since then, the program has grown, especially since the start of COVID and their use of social media. When talking about their growth and their new recruitment methods, Ashfah said, “When we were in person we started out with a very basic google form with questions and essay responses asking for potential volunteers who would want to work with the students and create lesson plans. We would like to advertise that through physical flyers, facebook, and people that we knew because we weren’t as big as we were now. Now it’s definitely shifted a lot because we have a bigger social media following and we mostly recruit through a post and having an attached google form. Right now we’re not currently recruiting because we just added a marketing team who's responsible for all of our social media stuff. We had a web development team who was responsible for creating our website. We also have about fifteen volunteers working on building up new curricula, largely because of our social media following.”
In the future, they’re planning on launching their psychology and drama curricula, partnering with other groups, and hopefully holding in person sessions before the end of the year. To end our conversation, as we like to do at the Outsiders Guide, we asked them what piece of advice they had for our readers.
Ashfah said that our readers should take the time to really think about their wants. “It’s not selfish to think about what you want. Your wants and interests matter and always push for a way to get them even if there are boundaries in the way.”
Tasnimul said, “don’t focus on other people’s opinions, and focus on your growth and end result instead. There are a lot of things to do, so take advantage of the opportunities. Time is important, so make sure you’re doing something and having fun at the same time.”
To check out the REACH project, we suggest you head to their website linked here or their instagram @officialreachproject . Thanks again to Ashfah and Tasnimul for taking the time to talk to us!
