Train 2,400 Indian girls as peer health leaders

Dear Adolescent Health Champion,

Adolescent Health Champions (AHC) is going through unprecedented times. With a heavy heart, we inform you that our very own Ricky Rajesh Sharma, the co-founder and President of Adolescent Health Champions (AHC) tragically passed away in a car accident four weeks ago while he was in Rajasthan, India on his way to build out AHC. Ricky’s passing is an enormous personal and professional loss for all of us at AHC. In this unimaginable situation, we at AHC are tremendously driven to carry forward Ricky’s vision of a world where every adolescent is holistically healthy, educated, and empowered to pursue their goals and talents. We request your generous funds to keep Ricky’s vision alive and to honor his life. 

Ricky was a Social Enterprise Fellow and Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard Kennedy School and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he received a joint degree with a BS in Economics from the Wharton School and a BA in Political Science. Ricky was a former financial and business professional who spent many years working in the financial services industry. He could have easily remained in this comfortable career but Ricky felt called to action to do more with his life and to apply his business and financial background in the non-profit sector. He was the first to express interest in creating and building AHC and wanted to focus on the operational, administrative and fundraising aspects of our organization, formerly called Girls Health Champions. We cannot begin to describe Ricky's passion for Adolescent Health and his vision to empower the 24-crore adolescent population of India and across the globe. At a time when there were only feeble talks about catering to this cause, Ricky decided to step up and give this cause the voice it needed, and that’s very much evident in the work he accomplished in his lifetime through AHC. 

Under Ricky’s able guidance, for the financial year 2023-2024, we renewed our partnership agreement with Ugam Education Foundation (UEF) and launched Girls Health Champions (GHC) in 105 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) schools in 9 districts in Jharkhand. This year, we aim to train 2500+ adolescent girls as peer educators or Champions who will provide critical adolescent health education to over 13,500 adolescent girls in rural Jharkhand in the 2023-24 academic year. 

In Rajasthan, post the successful launch of our mental health pilot in January & February 2023, we are committed to expanding our partnership with Urmul Setu and launching our adolescent mental health intervention in 25 rural government schools in Lunkaransar Block in the Bikaner District of Rajasthan. In total, we are in a position to train 450+ peer educators or Champions who will lead sessions on mental health with over 3,500 adolescents in these 25 government schools. 

As you can see, we are sustaining our existing operations and not backing down from our commitments. But we know that Ricky was always encouraging us to do more.  In the coming years, we want to continue scaling and expanding our existing partnerships, along with building new connections on the way. Our team is equipped to execute and run our existing interventions, but we require your urgent support in fueling the organization for the 2023-2024 financial year so we may reach 130 schools to support close to 20,000 adolescents. AHC would be eternally grateful for your generous funds in our time of need, to support us in keeping Ricky’s dreams alive as we continue to scale and expand our programming, striving to reach more and more adolescents as Ricky always encouraged us to do. 

For Ricky,
Developed by his beloved Adolescent Health Champions team