Seven-year-old Anakh Sawhney was walking with her parents on the streets of New York City and noticed people with signs that said they were hungry. The need these people expressed was foreign to her, but even at such a tender age Sawhney knew something was not right.
While many 7-year-olds would forget and move onto something else, Sawhney could not. She asked her parents, Jasmeet and Niti, how she and they could help.
The answer came from the Bernardsville family's beliefs. According to Sawhney, the desire to help others is inspired by Sikhism’s core principle of selfless service known as "vand chakhna," which means "to share what one has with others."
At age 9, Sawhney founded the Pranakh Foundation. Rice Kids is an initiative of her nonprofit organization that aims to fight hunger on a global scale.
Most recently the now 16-year-old Bernards High School junior was named a 2025 NJBIZ Rising Star in the 40 Under 40 category. A Rising Star is an up-and-coming professional who is 29 years old or younger that demonstrates exceptional potential for future leadership, according to NJBIZ.
She is the youngest ever to be named a Rising Star in the 40 Under 40 category.
"That was a great honor," said Sawhney. "It made me realize that what I was doing is working. It's making an impact on people. I was just happy about that, and I was very humbled to receive the award."
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Unlike most organizations that manage symptoms like hunger and educational inequality rather than eliminating them, Rice Kids enables sustainable development through education, nutrition and economic opportunity.
"We realized that if we're just feeding them, we're just creating the symptoms of this problem, and the problem is poverty," Sawhney said. "We wanted to get to the root cause of why this much poverty was happening. We can't just end poverty by feeding a bunch of people."
Rice Kids has created partnerships with 300 organizations, including those 7,500 miles away in India, to provide aid to daily wage migrant workers struggling to survive. It has helped 71,000 people experiencing poverty in five U.S. states and multiple regions in India by mobilizing hundreds of volunteers and raising more than $100,000.
"A big reason for a lot of families in poverty is because they're unable to break the cycle of poverty," Sawhney said. "Parents have to go off to work. They have small paying jobs, so the children are stuck at home taking care of their siblings, or they're off doing some small paying job themselves. They're not going to school. And it's impossible, because all they're all thinking about is, how can they get food on the table tonight? They're not thinking about what's going to happen in the long term, because they can't. They can only think about how they're going to go to bed on a full stomach that night."
Rice Kids works to break the cycle of poverty by partnering with hundreds of shelters, schools, community centers and educational nonprofits to offer education and skills training while immediate relief programs address urgent survival needs. It has also physically served food at churches, food banks and shelters.
"Kids who have dropped out can return to school so they can focus on getting an education instead of just worrying about putting food on the table," Sawhney said. "By providing food security to these many, many kids, we are allowing them and enabling them to go get an education to help break the cycle."
In the next decade, Sawhney, who is thinking about majoring in economics or finance when she goes to college in two years, hopes to reach 10 times more people than she's reaching now. She also hopes to expand her work to places where poverty is more dense.
Rice Kids puts life into perspective for Sawhney.
"I'm always an anxious wreck − stressing out about school or something," she said. "But it really shows me how small my problems are. This nonprofit helps me realize that I should be grateful for what I have. The fact that I even get to worry about school and things like that is a blessing. And I've never had to worry about getting food on my family's dinner table or anything like that. This nonprofit has really humbled me and brought me down to earth. It has made me realize I should never, ever take anything for granted, and whatever I do have, I should be sharing it."
To volunteer, donate, inquire about partnerships or for more information, visit ricekids.org.
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Cheryl Makin is an award-winning feature, news and education reporter for, part of the USA Today Network. To get unlimited access, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.