Education Access
Competitions for the places talent scouts never look
Itay Ganor, a high school student at Magen David Academy, is in the first stages of building Reach & Rise, a nonprofit to run academic and problem-solving competitions in rural schools, refugee camps and neighborhoods without reliable internet.
Rural schools, refugee camps, neighborhoods without labs, libraries or reliable internet. These are the places, Itay Ganor says, that most talent scouts never think to look, and they are where he plans to run academic and problem-solving competitions.
The nonprofit is called Reach & Rise. He is a high school student at Magen David Academy and is still in the first stages. "I've been mapping out what a first competition would actually look like," he says: what subject or challenge to build it around, how to design something fair without assuming every participant has a laptop or stable Wi-Fi, and how to reach schools and communities that are usually left off the map.
“A dream is just a dream if you dont put dedication onto it”
Itay Ganor
The next stage, he says, would be talking to teachers and community organizers to understand what barriers actually stop bright students from being seen, so the model is built around real constraints.
The idea is not from a case study. "I've seen it myself, kids who out-think people with every advantage in the world, but who never get discovered simply because no one is looking where they are," he says.
"The world isn't short on genius," he says. "It's short on access to the places where genius gets noticed, funded, and given a real chance."
He runs his own AI website builder business, and plans to design and launch the Reach & Rise site himself.
"I care about this deeply because talent that never gets a shot, gets wasted," he says. "Somewhere, a kid who could have solved a real problem never gets the chance to try, and we all lose whatever they could have built, discovered, or changed."