Baking involves a careful reading of instructions and precise measurements of ingredients, which is what Coppell High School junior Ananditha Arasu enjoys.
“It gives me a sense of control because I’m the one putting in all the ingredients and controlling the factors,” Arasu said.
Arasu is spreading the same recipe to teenagers: how to control and take charge of your mental and physical wellbeing to be a happier and healthier person.
She runs the Radiant Ripple Foundation, a nonprofit organization empowering the mental and physical health of today’s youth.
“There are moments you can be happy, and I want to be able to spread those like a ripple,” Arasu said.
Arasu participated in a mentorship program about clinical and behavioral medicine at Vanderbilt University in January 2024, where she discovered her interest in teenagers’ mental health and wellbeing. At the end of the program, participants were expected to do a capstone project.
“I wanted to explore how stress and anxiety can affect high schoolers because that is something I have personally seen,” Arasu said. “So, I created a survey which I sent to students in the U.S., U.K. and India.”
Arasu’s idea of creating the Radiant Ripple Foundation, sparked when she received the survey results.
“When I got the results back, I was genuinely shocked at how many people were experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety,” Arasu said. “I wanted to do something about it but was not sure what exactly, so I thought of starting off by spreading more awareness on this topic as well as methods to cope with the issues.”
Arasu was selected as a student series speaker and won the outstanding presentation award at the Global Health Leaders Conference at Johns Hopkins University. She was also a finalist for the John Locke Essay Competition, where she wrote about the epidemic of stress and anxiety among today’s youth, for which she won a merit award.
“I am really passionate about this because it’s something I have witnessed first hand with my peers, the people I see everyday,” Arasu said. “I think about what I can do for the people I love and the people I interact with. That’s where my passion comes from.”
The Radiant Ripple Foundation achieves its goal of empowering teenage mental and physical health through blogs on the organization’s website and monthly podcasts on Spotify.
“We have so many conversations about the things she is reading about,” junior Anathi Mudunuri said. “So I think her having all this knowledge really helps her with her blogs and podcasts.”
The organization’s focus is currently catered toward teenagers.
“I do hope to reach a broader audience across all age groups instead of just one,” Arasu said. “I want adults to understand how their actions could affect the youth, and I also want younger kids to be aware of what not to do in the future, how to set boundaries and how to have that mindset going as they grow older.”
After graduating high school, Arasu plans to go down the medical pathway in college.
“[Arasu] has really done a good job of making difficult topics accessible to people, and I think the more we talk about them, the more they become relevant today,” health science teacher Kathryn Womochel said.
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