THE INSPIRATION: Last March, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Amruth Nandish heard his uncles worrying about his younger cousins. Amruth’s uncles are health-care workers, and they were spending long hours away from home caring for patients. “They said my cousins weren’t getting a chance to interact with other kids,” Amruth, 16, recalls. The Houston, Texas, teen could relate—a few years earlier, when his mom was working overtime to open her dental practice, he killed a lot of time watching TV. He hated the idea of his cousins being as bored and lonely as he had been. He decided to start an organization to give grade-school kids a more engaging outlet for their free time than he’d had at their age.
THE ACTION: Amruth launched Telementors, a free virtual tutoring and mentoring program that pairs high schoolers with children of essential workers. He drummed up interest through word of mouth, targeting health-care workers with kids ages 5 to 13. “I would get contact information and just cold-call people,” he says.
In addition to recruiting families for his service, Amruth signed on as a mentor. One of his first matches was with a 12-year-old boy whose pediatrician mother was at work all day. “We started out with me just tutoring him and not a lot of conversation,” Amruth says, but they soon bonded by playing puzzle games together over Zoom. “We would both talk about how our days had been,” Amruth recalls. “I could tell he appreciated having someone who understood what he was going through.”
THE OUTCOME: With help from a small army of volunteers, Telementors quickly expanded throughout Texas. Next, Amruth partnered with hospitals in California, Idaho, and North Carolina to offer his services to the children of hospital employees. Today, Telementors has enrolled more than 100 mentees and just as many mentors to work with them. The consistent one-on-one attention is key, Amruth says, because virtual classrooms can leave students feeling unnoticed by teachers and peers alike.
Next, Amruth hopes to expand Telementors to provide mentoring services to children who have terminal illnesses and need to spend most of their time in hospitals. He knows how important it is for all kids not to feel isolated: “Just having someone to talk to and listen to you can change your whole outlook,” he says.