Young girl smiling outdoors with green trees and a house in the background.

Tanya Patel is a senior at The Pingry School with a strong academic focus on economics, business, finance, and accounting.

She is the founder and president of Farming for GRACE, a student-led initiative that grows and donates culturally relevant produce to food-insecure families while promoting dignity and inclusion.

As a long-term volunteer with GRACE, she also designs bilingual recipe cards and leads community education. She mentors children and provides health app support to elders at her temple and coaches youth soccer.

Across all of her endeavors, Tanya is motivated by one throughline: ensuring systems—whether in food, technology, healthcare, or community—are built with equity, dignity, and inclusion at their core

My interest in building Educate For All came from a debate camp at the University of Pennsylvania, where I led my team to the semifinals by reframing an argument for the ethical use of AI.

That experience, along with my missions with GRACE (a student-led initiative that grows and donates culturally relevant produce to food-insecure families while promoting dignity and inclusion) and helping younger and elder members of my community with technology, spawned my commitment to breaking down complex technologies so that communities of all ages and backgrounds can understand how innovation affects health, equity, and everyday life.