Junior Achievement’s local 18 Under 18 winners are doing amazing things

Photo above courtesy of JA 18 Under 18 winner Khadicha Kosimjonova via KDKA-TV.

When kids put their minds to it, they can do amazing things. Locally, 18 young people from around the region were honored for what they’re doing to help others at the Junior Achievement of Western Pennsylvania’s 18 Under 18 Reception, held at Acrisure Stadium on Feb. 4.

One of the honorees is Khadicha Kosimjonava, a senior at Baldwin High School who founded a nonprofit called STEM Seeds. She and a team of 50 volunteers perform free, hands-on science experiments for young people in mostly low-income and marginalized communities.

“We’ll teach very basic chemistry concepts to students using slime,” Kosimjonava says about the kids’ favorite demonstration. “So we’ll give them the glue, and we’ll give them the borax solution, and they do the demonstration themselves. But we kind of teach them the concepts behind it. So why does slime come together when glue and borax are mixed together? It’s because of the atoms starting to bond.”

She also started a club at her school called S.A.F.E. Club which stands for Sisterhood, Affection, Freedom and Equity.

“It was a Woman Empowerment Club that I first started at my high school, where local women leaders in STEM would come in and talk about their STEM careers to the girls at Baldwin High School,” she says. “This actually expanded to 16 chapters worldwide.”

Sagar Raghavan, another Junior Achievement of Western PA 18 Under 18 Honoree, is a junior at North Allegheny Senior High School and founded a non-profit called Futr, pronounced “future.”

Raghavan took it upon himself to learn about finances, investing and taxes. But it was a revelation about his parents, who are from India, that inspired him to create an online tax calculator and financial information tailored to immigrants.

“That’s what really drove me to start this because I really understood: Wow, my parents don’t know as much as I do, which was interesting because they’ve always known more than I do, or they should,” he says. “But in this specific spot, they didn’t. And it’s because of their immigrant nature.”

Raghavan is working on partnering with 80 organizations around the country that work with immigrants to use his website Futr, and he’s enhancing the tax calculator using AI.

You can learn about all amazing 18 young people from around our region, as well as more about what Junior Achievement of Western Pennsylvania does, right here.