Shrochis Karki ’09 is acutely aware of the sacrifices his family made to send him to Kenyon. His way of paying them back is by “paying it forward” for others.
In July, Karki was one of two people awarded the 2014 Quinn Prize from the Jack Kent Cooke organization, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the education of exceptional students with limited financial resources. In typical Karki fashion, he donated the $10,000 prize, given in recognition of extraordinary community achievements, to the Samaanta Foundation, an initiative he created to make education possible for students in his home country of Nepal.
Since graduating from Kenyon, Karki, who is finishing his doctoral degree in international development from the University of Oxford with a highly competitive Jack Kent Cooke scholarship, has raised $30,000 for his foundation. The Samaanta Foundation has been able to award nine fellowships covering tuition, room and board, books and transportation to help students finish their high school education. Part of the fellowship program includes volunteer service to ensure that the community also benefits from the grants.
“At Samaanta, we are committed to creating a culture of giving,” said Karki in a blog on the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation website.
Giving the prize money to Samaanta was an easy decision. “We are a young organization with numerous resource constraints, and since the award money is quite substantial, it will go a long way towards supporting our work in the future,” he wrote in the blog. “My hope will be to try and use this as seed money to start an endowment that will ensure the sustainability of our work.”
About this photo: Karki, second from right, with some fellows from the Samaanta Foundation.