We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ishaan Cheng Patel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Ishaan with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
I get my work ethic from the examples around me, specifically my family. I am raised by a mother who works very hard and makes time to do family activities and outreach with me and my brother. Another example is my grandparents. My Ye-Ye (grandfather) is 78 and still working full time. When he is not working, he makes sure his house is clean and helps with me and my brother. My Nai-Nai (grandmother) is 73 and finds time to cook for us every week and helps with outreach. She often picks us up from school if my mom has to work. She also goes out of her way to help our nonprofit efforts by cooking for UMU. Every week she provides delicious homemade meals that are fan favorites of the people downtown. All these examples and role models around me empower and inspire me to follow those footsteps and work hard as they do.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Right now I am focused on school and my classes as it is my junior year of high school and I am also actively involved in my nonprofit. Our recent youth camps are very exciting for me. UMU has recently begun hosting free youth basketball camps. I know when I was playing sports and doing Tae Kwon Do, the costs for children’s extracurricular activities were substantial and not everyone can afford to have these experiences. We are trying to introduce the game of basketball to underprivileged kids and teach skills such as teamwork, leadership, good sportsmanship, and grit. At first, we had a professional youth coach come in and lead the camp. I observed how he put the kids through stations and ran the camp and assisted. These stations had different focuses such as ball handling, movement, form shooting, and layup skills. After this, the coach took a break for lunch and then had the kids play games such as knockout and had them utilize their freshly learned skills in a scrimmage. For our second camp, I took on a leadership role as head coach and UMU had all youth teen coaches run the camp. With the help of teen volunteers, we used the foundation we learned from the first camp and made slight alterations to make the second camp our own. We incorporated a new game called King of the Court to allow intermediate kids who knew how to play to experience one-on-one opportunities, honing their already developed skills. We also organized two scrimmages running at the same time to accommodate for the skill differences in the kids so that the intermediate kids would have a challenge and not overwhelm the beginner kids. The feedback from the community has been great and I am looking forward to hosting another camp with more improvements with each camp. In the future, UMU also will hopefully host different camps incorporating different skills to the program with different sports and even fine arts and music so that we can expose under-served kids to different extracurriculars and enrich their development.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Three qualities and skills that were impactful in my journey are communication, confidence, and teamwork, It is important to have a clear way of communicating your ideas to become successful. For example, you should have a good plan to start and then communicate those plans effectively for your plan to work. I planned out a schedule for the basketball camp and then showed that to the other youth coaches. We communicated in a group chat so that we could figure out the best way to run the camp. Another important quality to have is confidence. This also ties into communication as well. In order to communicate well, you should be confident about the subject. Doing research is important so that you have background knowledge and then you can speak confidently. A third quality is to be willing to reach out to others for help or feedback. This can mean being open to criticism or being open to help and collaborations. For example, UMU has many different sister nonprofits, community partners, individuals and groups that all work together in different ways so that we can help more people.
Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
Someone who has helped me in the face of adversity all my life is my mom. She always emphasizes the importance of being prepared and well organized, the advantage of being able to multitask, being adaptable, and leads by example. Since I was young, she would try tasks that I wanted to try too. For example, she broke boards in the same way as I had to for every belt test in Taekwondo. A leader leads from the front which is why she would take on a challenge first and does the work. She is always organizing or cleaning while preparing or planning for something in the future. I am encouraged to do what I can when I can and to not be afraid to try new things like starting a youth basketball camp or speaking in public about UMU. I also learned how to be adaptable when something doesn’t work out and to keep going. She has taught me many skills and shown me many qualities that are important to becoming a great leader like she is.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.under-my-umbrella.org
- Instagram: under_my_umbrella_dfw
- Facebook: UnderMyUmbrellaDFW
Image Credits
Headshot: Jess Winniford
