Hi, I'm Amy Meurs and you're listening to The Power of Young People, a podcast produced by the National Youth Leadership Council where we explore how young people are using their ideas, creativity and passion to change the world, their communities and the lives of others. If you're a young person who wants to change the world or an adult who wants to foster youth innovation and imagination, this shows for you. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts so you don't miss out on new episodes. Before we dive in, we'd like to give a huge thank you to the BUSER Family Foundation, a presenting sponsor of The Power of Young People podcast. Their support helps us share important conversations that empower young people to lead and serve in their communities. The BUSER Family Foundation believes that we should all make time to thank a teacher today. Now, let's jump into today's episode. Welcome to The Podcast. I'm Amy Meurs and today we have an inspiring guest to his redefining science, education and accessibility. Imagine a world where science isn't limited by expensive labs or equipment, where curiosity and creativity drive hands-on learning for all. That's exactly what science nexus is making possible. So joining me today is Salami, the founder of science nexus, a student-led adult-advised nonprofit dedicated to breaking down barriers in STEM education. I'm really excited to have Sanvi join us, so we're going to be talking about the power of experiential learning, the importance of making STEM accessible to everyone and how young people can take the lead creating meaningful change. So let's get started. Sanvi, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. I would love to have you share just a little bit about yourself, maybe your personal connection to science or a moment or experience that sparked your passion. I'm really interested in learning more about why science and more about you. Yeah, definitely. So I was born and raised in San Diego, California. And from a young age, I've always really been passionate about science, which I think was largely inspired by the area I live in, because there's just so many biotechnology companies and different areas around my community. So my journey into the world of science began during elementary school, actually, when I participated in my first science fair. And back then, my project investigated the melting times at differently shaped pieces of ice. Or I spent weeks just researching, designing, experimenting, creating different data tables and putting it together. And just for that small experiment, I felt really proud of my accomplishments and everything I was able to do. The joy I experienced meeting the challenges and satisfying my curiosity. And since then, I've always been eager to participate in different science fairs and look forward to finding new projects. So through this, I just became really involved in science and understood the impact and passion it can actually have in people's lives. That's awesome. I love that. I love the visual of you experimenting on ice. That's really fun. I hadn't even thought about ice as a science experiment. I'm really curious about the story behind science nexus, kind of what inspired you to start the initiative, what's it all about? Yeah. So as I mentioned, science here has always been a really big part of my journey. And actually, in my freshman year of high school, I had the opportunity to become a finalist at the International Science and Engineering Fair, which had students from 80 different countries all together on one platform presenting their projects. Each finalist there had a really inspiring story of how they overcame their challenges and gone involved in research. And I realized that despite different resource constraints or any lack of access to education they might have had, they still used determination and dedication to connect amazing research with the resources they had available to them. So I realized that many students from underserved communities might not always be able to work around these restrictions and they might never unlock their potential simply because they lack the opportunity or encouragement to try. This realization motivated me to find science nexus and to promote curiosity in different communities to nurture creativity for underserved communities and inspire them to take advantage of what they can and get involved with science if they really want to. There's so much to unpack in that. And I'm really, when you're talking about science nexus and making science accessible without all the expensive lab equipment and everything that goes into that, what are some of the really innovative ways that you're bringing science to life for students? So, one primary goal, as you mentioned, is to make science and STEM education as accessible as possible and this means reaching areas that might not have access to these large corporations or might not be able to travel to different expensive research facilities. To address this, we designed experiments using the low cost and locally available materials that are present in different areas. So, cardboard, straws, rubber bands, and sharing that science is accessible for all the different communities. For example, in Ghana, we created functional models of the digestive system using everyday materials so students can actually visualize these complex biological processes. And in the Philippines, we worked with the Eastern Pengson Agricultural College to explore different nutrition options by utilizing the plants that grow right in their backyard as actually. So, this is just ways that we can integrate science into daily life with practical applications and they prove that scientific exploration doesn't always require expensive tools, just creativity and innovation that people can explore models using what they actually have access to. That's so important because exactly what you said, right, like people, different schools don't have access to all of the expensive equipment, you know, the beaker, like all of the things right when we think about science or science classroom here in the US and all of the things that could be found sometimes in those classrooms, to be able to access using things that are right there in the community. I'm really curious too about how the work that you're doing really encourages like hands-on engagement of the young people despite using or maybe to the benefit of using local, how do you keep them like engaged and get young people hands-on in science? Definitely. So, even with all the different resource constraints, we always aim to make our workshops as interactive and engaging as possible. This includes involving students in every single step of the process, from crushing the different strawberries when you're adding reagents during DNA extraction, to putting together pieces to make a robot using legos or something, and in general, campus studies have found that there's better educational outcomes later in life when people are exposed to this childhood curiosity and innovation process. So curiosity inspired by experiments is a pretty central model for our mission. We also create different manuals that outline different hands-on experiments that can be easily incorporated into regular curriculum at schools all around the world, and we distribute these to teachers and schools, so they have an idea of how to make their own education more hands-on and engaging for students. We believe it's really important to capture the interest of the students from a very early age and this can inspire their actions later in life. Can you share a success story from the students side or the community side that has benefited from your approach? Yeah, for sure. So we've been working closely with Daeglega School in the Upper East Region of Ghana and there we work by passing out pamphlets about different STEM concepts, organizing workshops, and over time we've noticed a significant increase in the grades of students and their enthusiasm for science overall. So one student there in particular was really inspired by his experiences with science nexus that he actually chose STEM as his career path. Before this, he was pretty unaware of the different diverse career options related to science or how captiving the field could actually be. And one of the engineering workshops we did there actually opened up a whole new world for him. He continued to look for other STEM opportunities after that, he stayed in contact with us, and today he's actually studying at an engineering college in Ghana and has become the chapter lead for our organization over there. So he's passing this inspiration on to future generations using what we gave him and moving that forward. So that's just been really inspiring to see when impact we've been able to create four different communities. That's amazing, just super inspiring. One of the things that I find really intriguing about science nexus is your emphasis on the community-centric learning hubs. What makes these hubs different from like a traditional science education program? And how do you recruit and train local volunteers to support the hubs? So as I mentioned before, traditional science education programs are much more theoretical and they're not as engaging to students because they start losing interest after some time. They also don't understand the specific cultural nuances that are associated with different areas and the specific needs over there. Through our community-centric learning hubs, we basically aim to partner with schools and adult advisors to reach out to organizations in that area and create a network of support. For example, to foster a strong connection between different learning centers and to share resources, we've done partnerships between public and private schools. We've reached out to communities and other organizations in that area and done partner workshops over there. So we basically aim to create a general area that promotes science. We basically recruit volunteers through various different ways. Some of the students have reached out to us through our website because they're interested in starting a chapter. Others have been involved with science nexus workshops and want to lead some of their own. Or sometimes we see their interest in science and we reach out to them to see if they're interested in opening up a chapter in that area. Once we've gone over all the curriculum with the leaders and a specific action plan for the area, we start hosting workshops. This way, people can communicate with others who have similar interests as them and have locations or companies that they can reach out to and rely on if they ever need any additional help. Thank you for sharing that. I think that idea of community centered, having volunteers and people trained to work in communities is so important. You have done such amazing work in so many different locations. I'm curious about some of the challenges that you faced with science nexus and how you overcome them because sometimes those challenges help us move even further ahead. So if you could share some of those things with us, we would love that. Yeah, so I think one of the largest challenges we faced has definitely been approaching the different needs of different communities because each community has a different problems in accessing science education there and they require a different approach towards education because of that. For example, in some places in Chile, have had a lot of access to books and different facilities they need for science research. In India, we basically aim to spark curiosity towards science learning and in the Philippines, we help mentor participants for science bears to address their lack of staff at schools in that region. In Pakistan, we tried to promote in particular education for women because of the disparity that is going on over there. Also, there's a lot of different language barriers when it comes to communication with these chapters. So bridging these gaps, understanding the problem and actually creating a team of people that can work to overcome these challenges was probably the hardest part of science access. One way we overcame that was by collecting these local chapter leads and local volunteers to run customized workshops in certain areas and also through surveys by reaching out to the communities there, seeing what they wanted to work on and some issues they faced when trying to access STEM knowledge or STEM education in their communities. So by working along with the people and trying to understand the problems in different areas we were able to overcome these challenges and create a team that can help our communication and organization of workshops. I really appreciate how community centered the work that you're doing is it just yeah, there are so many challenges that can happen when you're working in as many countries as you are, but that community centered is so powerful. One of the other things you mentioned, I started to try to count how many countries you're just mentioned, but I lost count, so sorry about that, but you're working globally. And so I'm curious about partners and the role that partnerships play in your mission and if there are any partners or collaborators that are really shaping how your organization is working to meet its mission. Partnerships definitely play a really crucial role in expanding our reach and enhancing our resource efficiency since most of the organization we partnered with are centered in very specific local areas. So working with them we can create our own chapter there and understand the needs of that community. By collaborating with local and global partners we were able to leverage our expertise, share different resources, tailor education programs and pool their access to different materials to create a wider spread and organization for the different workshops. So the collaborations mainly allows to optimize different costs and education tools for more impactful hands-on experiences for the students. One of our best partnerships was actually right here in San Diego where we work with the UCSD Neuroscience Outreach Program to bring neuroscience focused STEM education to local schools. There's some underserved schools in the communities and we help them contact the UCSD Neuroscience Outreach Program and the organization there actually brought brains of different animals to show to the students and explore the different anatomy there. So that was really inspiring to see all these students who hadn't really seen parts of different animals before get excited at seeing the different brains. We've also worked with the Latin America Leadership Academy and working with them has allowed us to integrate STEM into the communities there by putting us into contact with different schools we could do workshops with and some areas that might not have access to some resources there. So because these organizations do have better knowledge of the communities we can work with them and create a much better impact overall. When you were talking about the students seeing the brains of the animals it just I had a flashback to elementary school when we went to a farm and it was a farm that was more like a science-based where you got to learn and understand about the animals and we got to see the stomachs of cows. And so I think I just had a flashback as you were sharing about that. Those type of experiences are so impactful especially for young people, for students of younger ages. So I think that hands-on experiencing things that are new and different and that connection to STEM and all of the work you're doing it's so powerful. How do you see science-necks expanding over the next five years? Especially as I'm thinking about you're probably transitioning towards college in my correct. Yeah so I'm currently a junior in high school right now. College is definitely coming close but I think science-nexus will still say a really big part of my life even when I move into college because as you mentioned like seeing these different experiences and the students getting access to these different opportunities has been really inspiring for me too and I'm sure I'm going to stay on this organization and continue expanding it. So in the next five years I mainly aim to create more chapters in different areas and increase the frequency of workshops in each of our different existing chapters. Essentially strengthening our foundation and building on it so we can impact even more students. We plan to incorporate different advanced technologies like robotics to further enhance hands-on learning and this can be through fundraising, through contacting other organizations to get parts and work with the students to deliver these skills and give them the access to materials necessary for these workshops. We also want to encourage more students to participate in science fairs because personally I think this is a really good opportunity to foster innovation and curiosity for actual real-world problem-solving and gives them the opportunity to learn the skills and the dedication necessary but even when there's challenges in their way they can move past them and still come up with a good research idea that they can then use to help the communities themselves. A great example of this is our Chibi Chapter Head who last year actually started research on developing a school phyto first aid kit that he's hoping to implement in the schools and firmer. So his and his team have been successfully building a greenhouse to cultivate these medicinal plants and transforming them into outdoor education spaces while understanding the process of innovation through scientific exploration. So just encouraging more of this innovation-centered approach to students and expanding our reach to a lot of different areas I think science axis had a lot of potential to help a lot of different students in the upcoming years. I couldn't agree more and what I really appreciate too Sunday is you guys really use a service learning model and so you've been hitting on all of the different parts between you know investigating what's happening in your community the assets of your community that you can tap into when you talk about like the vital first aid kit like that that was centered to what's happening meeting the needs of your community. So when you're talking about the research part we equate that to the investigation phase within service learning. You talked about community partnerships and building partnerships with community both volunteers and and others to help with the program expansion and I just it excites me hearing you talk about this work that you're doing in the global scale to what you're doing and just the impact that you're having right now and the work that I know will blossom over the next few years. One of the things that I love to ask because you're making things happen and on a global scale. So as a student-led young person-led organization what advice do you have for other young people who are like inspired by what you're doing or want to start something different they see see an issue they want to take action what advice do you have for them. I think my number one piece of advice will always be don't hesitate to take the first step because when you're starting an organization a lot of people have really good ideas but they hesitate to take that final leap and actually execute it. It can definitely be very scary because people are often scared by the fear of the unknown or what will happen when they start or they think that whatever small actions they are able to take they won't actually add up or make a significant difference but when I started Science Nexus I thought the same. I didn't know if I would be able to succeed or if the workshops would take off and actually be able to make an impact on the students but step-by-step we've currently grown to 12 different countries and we're hoping to expand this number in the future. So I think everyone should take whatever idea they have take the first step and start it just to see what will happen you'll definitely face problems in your way and you'll have to adapt to changes in your plan but this is part of the journey and once you do adapt and you create a good thriving organization then you'll be happy you actually made the change you did and you'll be satisfied with the work you've done. Wonderful advice so everyone rewind listen to that again because that was amazing advice. So Sami you are a global leader in step education. I'm just saying that and you are a global leader in step education. How do you think step education needs to evolve so that it better prepares and meets the needs of students for the future? I think step education definitely needs to shift away from its primarily theoretical approach that currently has to emphasize one of collaboration experiential learning and inclusivity. Currently anywhere you go in the workplace in corporate jobs at universities you're never going to find the scientist working alone. Science itself comes from a collaboration of different resources different areas of knowledge and different ideas bouncing off each other to find the best optimal path. Many schools focus a lot on memorization based learning or theoretical from the textbook rather than actual hands-on application which makes it difficult for students to then turn around take this knowledge and apply it somewhere else when they don't have a deep understanding of the process to start with. That's why by making step more interactive we can better prepare students for real-world challenges and careers in science and technology. Once we do this it also increases accessibility to science education because more people have the skills necessary to come from diverse backgrounds and still engage in STEM together with diverse perspectives and different experiences coming from life. So hands-on learning with locally available materials and these applications make science more approachable and relevant in current STEM education and also fosters more collaboration to create more people actually going through these STEM jobs and advancing their socio-economic status because they have the opportunity to explore innovate and contribute to the future of science and technology. Wonderful, wonderfully said. So for people who are listening who want to learn more or get involved in science and access how can they support or participate? Where should we send them? What should they be doing? Yeah so we're always looking for new volunteers or anyone who wants to get involved with some chapters and expand our impact. Those who are interested can start a chapter in the area or get involved with any existing chapter and help organize workshops for communities in the region. To get involved you can visit our website www.sciencenexus.com, follow our Instagram, science_nexus or reach out through email which is
[email protected] to join our growing community and get in contact with us. Wonderful, so I want to just open it up, Sanvi, is there anything you'd like anything else you'd like to let our listeners know about today or a message that you want to leave them with? Yeah I think one message I definitely like to leave listeners today is that it's critical to make science inclusive, collaborative and accessible for everybody. To inspire the next generation of scientists innovation can come from anywhere or anyone so no one should get discouraged because they think they won't be able to make an impact in the field. Sparking curiosity is the first step to empowering underserved communities to excel in a constantly evolving scientific world and bridge the gap between science and technology in different countries. Wonderful, Sanvi, what an incredible conversation, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I think sciencenexus is just proof that innovation and impact don't require expensive labs, you need a commitment to curiosity, creativity, community, all of the things that you have been talking about, your work is so inspiring, 12 countries and growing. How amazing is that? I also just want to announce to everyone we have some some great news to share. Sciencenexus has been named the winner of the 2025 Youth Leadership for Service Learning Excellence Award. Congratulations, Sanvi, and everyone at Sciencenexus. So this award recognizes their outstanding and that's like underscored exclamation point outstanding commitment to service learning and STEM education and it's going to be presented March 28th of this year. So just next week actually at the 36th annual National Service Learning Conference in St. Paul. So I get to see Sanvi in person and give her a hug and a huge congratulations in person. I'm very excited about that. So we hope everyone listening will join us in celebrating and congratulating them on just this amazing work that they're doing. So again, congratulations, Sanvi. You and your team are just doing such outstanding work across the globe and we're excited that we can honor you with this award this year. Thank you so much. It's been great to have this opportunity and see the power of this organization and thank you so much for having me on this podcast to share something about Lightwork. Absolutely. And to everyone who's listening. So if you were sparked, something sparked in you after today's episode, be sure to check out sciencenexus.org or all the Instagram wherever you want to connect with Sanvi to learn more, get involved, support their mission and whether you're a student and educator or simply someone who believes that the power of hands-on learning, we know that there's a place for you in this movement. So connect with Sanvi and sciencenexus, connect with NYLC and we really want to support you in making the change you want to see in this world. So thank you to everyone for tuning in. And again, if you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe, share and leave a review. It helps us bring more stories like this one to listeners across the globe. So until next time, we hope, as always, you will join us as we serve, learn, change the world. See you next time.
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