Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarayu Ayyalasomayajula and Divya Tadanki.
Sarayu and Divya, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Currently, we are both first-years studying Neuroscience on the pre-med track at Georgia Tech. We began our Atlanta chapter in May 2022 after serving as Sierra Project Interns for a year. Using what we learned from our past chapter, we established our own branch of SPF and began recruiting interns from all over the world. Once our team was made, we worked with other SPF leaders from Colorado and New York to get our comic distribution process started. As founders, we dealt with the logistics involved with finding organization partnerships and spearheading our comic creation efforts. While we are tasked with a lot of the behind-the-scenes work, our team of ten interns manages areas including social media, comic illustration/writing, and outreach. In total, we have sent at least 200 comics (and counting) to 10+ global organizations—all in the past eight months! We are so lucky to have had such a successful year thus far and are looking forward to all that we accomplish as a chapter in the near future.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The journey has been a relatively smooth road. However, it did take us time to get the ball rolling and get our chapter set up. We did initially struggle with procuring partnerships with health organizations, but once those connections were set up, we were able to send out the comics with ease.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Our goal is to help remedy health disparities and inequity in access to health education by creating easily understandable and accessible comics on a variety of health topics. We connect with organizations locally and internationally that focus on health education and create comics that suit their needs. We’ve written, designed, and illustrated comics on menstrual health, diabetes, dental health, and maternal health and are currently working on writing three comics for an organization based in Vietnam. We’re proud that we’ve been able to get our comics out to communities in need and are even more thrilled that we’re beginning to expand internationally.
Who else deserves credit in your story?
We’re very thankful to Kasha Akrami, SPF’s initial founder, for starting the organization and supporting all the SPF chapters through our journeys. Mira and Meghan Nigudkar, the current co-directors of SPF, have also supported us in managing our chapter, and we’re endlessly grateful for the encouragement they have provided us with during our first year as an organization in Atlanta. Lastly, we would not have our chapter of SPF without the guidance of Riya Gokhale, for whom we served as interns. She encouraged us to begin our own chapter and gave us the skills to run our organization; we take after much of her leadership skills in running our own chapter.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sierraprojectfoundation.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sierraprojectatl/
