Article sponsored by Milpitas Charity Bingo.
PARI Foundation, a Milpitas nonprofit with the mission of supporting education and empowerment for rural and underprivileged students, has been operating for 12 years and has provided educational, volunteerism, and other pro-community opportunities to over 120,000 school-age students.
In addition, PARI has provided active support to 85 graduates and overseen tree-planting projects whereby students have planted 15,000 trees.
The foundation’s goal is to support children-in-need by encouraging them to stay in school, while reducing the drop-out rate as much as possible.
Staffed by an impassioned crew of board members and volunteers devoted to raising funds for and pouring energy into their cause, the Foundation has a variety of interests yet centers its every step on aiding students in continuing their education.
PARI’s Founder Kishore Nakka spoke to The Milpitas Beat by phone.
Said Kishore, “We just wanted to create something that has a lasting impact.” To that end, they sold a previous company, a for-profit endeavor. From the beginning, the question lighting PARI Foundation’s path was, “How do we make sure our next generation is well-educated?”
During its first few years, the organization used its connections and grassroots support in India to do work there. But in more recent years, PARI has taken its efforts to the San Francisco Bay Area…
Although education is a central PARI concern, healthcare is also of paramount importance, as is helping kids understand how they can help to protect the environment. Essentially, education is the tree from which PARI’s other concerns spread out like branches.
PARI Board Trustee Anu Nakka (who is married to Kishore) spoke with The Beat about PARI’s intention of making an impact locally, right here in Milpitas. “During Covid,” she explained, “we tried to do some Math [tutoring] and help students with other subjects.” Since schools had become limited and learning had largely gone online, PARI saw an opportunity to provide direct educational support.
Along with working on PARI, Anu is also a Trustee on the Milpitas Unified School District’s (MUSD) Board of Education.
More recently, PARI Foundation has initiated a scholarship program, and will be providing $5,000 to 10 or 12 students enrolled in MUSD schools. The money will be put toward online subscriptions to learning academies where the students can study AI, cloud computing, and other forms of technology.
In the meantime, the Foundation will actively encourage all its scholarship recipients, as well as all the other students in its orbit, to progress through their lives with a spirit of community engagement.
Kishore recalled a recent string of visits to a homeless center in Oakland, during which students affiliated with PARI Foundation had the opportunity to provide blankets, sleeping bags, food, and clothes to unhoused people. To the Foundation, these community outreach activities go hand in hand with education, for of what value is education if it does not ultimately cultivate decent citizens?
Anu explained that translated to English, “PARI” means “Guardian Angel or Fairy.”
“In fact,” she added, “we had our startup named ‘PARI Networks’, when we were expecting our first baby. My husband’s family never had a girl child in his family for 3 generations (almost 100 years). We were blessed with 2 girls in 2005 and 2009. Then we initiated PARI Foundation, after our start-up got acquired by Cisco.”
Recently, PARI Foundation became an official certifying organization for the President’s Volunteer Service Awards.
Learn more about PARI Foundation here.
