Meet the exuberant Gunjan Aggarwal, Founder and CEO at Learn With Leaders and a brilliant education disruptor based in India. While many teens struggle during this pandemic (depression and anxiety rates have doubled globally), she and her co-founders, Bejoy Veer Suri and Shubham Gupta have created a haven of hope. At Learn with Leaders, students can develop meaningful relationships with peers from other countries, solve global problems and develop their dreams from the inside out. She and her team have built an international learning community of impressive mentors, educators, and high schoolers. About 40% of their students are US-based, with the remainder representing over 100 different countries so far.

After fourteen years of being a consultant, executive, and entrepreneur, Aggarwal turned her focus and unleashed her talents on education reform. Her vision is to develop a new way to educate teens that eliminates barriers and leverages every individual’s passions and path. Their affordable and dynamic programs include competitions, internships, and innovative courses with global leaders, faculty, experienced mentors from renowned universities across the globe and reputed corporations. Ultimately, Learn with Leaders will provide access to college education while in high school in a challenging, soulful, entertaining, and accessible way, no matter a student’s academic record, location, or economic status. Her vision and enthusiasm for change are contagious, and the company is growing rapidly.

My colleague Tracy Goodsel and I designed and led a program in partnership with Ambika Bhura at Learn with Leaders last year called the Compassionate Leadership Program. The next cohort begins in April. Students learned about themselves, wrote, illustrated, and published a series of children’s books on leadership, now available on Amazon, and presented projects linked to their soul work. (Soul work is the best possible way to express compassion, passions, and purpose.) These talented and empathetic students named the series Lessons to Future Leaders and chose Save the Children as the charity that will benefit from book sales. Click here to see the original article