(August 24, 2023) Five years ago, Nitish Sood and his brother, Aditya were at the mall with their mother. Bored, the two boys stepped outside for a game of frisbee. A homeless woman sat by the entrance, as people walked past, all of them either pulling out their phones or checking their watches to avoid making eye contact with her. “We were kind of troubled by that,” said Nitish Sood, who co-founded Working Together For Change, a student-run organisation that works for homeless people.
“Our frisbee landed near her so we ended up striking up a conversation,” said Nitish. They asked the obvious question – how did this woman come to be homeless? She responded with a question: “What do you want to be when you grow up.” A doctor, Nitish said at once and to his amazement, the woman pulled out a medical degree. Just before she was placed into a residency, she returned to Atlanta to help her brother, who had been involved with gang violence. “She lost that residency. Medical school bills started piling up and suddenly, she was homeless,” Nitish explained. “My brother and I learned that nearly everyone is just a step away from homelessness. We decided to do something about it.”
Nitish and Aditya Sood
Working Together For Change
That’s how Working Together for Change was born. “We wanted to interact with other homeless folk, the people we tend to avoid by checking the time or looking at our phones.” They realised that they had been wrong about the average homeless person. “We seem to think of middle-aged men, maybe drunk, doing drugs and sleeping on a park bench. Mostly, we believe him to be lazy, uneducated and unambitious. But that is as far away from reality as you can possibly imagine.”
Now a student at the Medical College of Georgia, Nitish Sood is doing his residency in Opthalmology. His brother, Aditya, is a junior biology and social major at Alpharetta and an MD candidate at the Emory School of Medicine. Both brothers are highly accomplished in their own right- Aditya is a black belt in karate and does research at the Neuroplasticity lab at Georgia State University. Nitish is a Presidential Scholar at Augusta University, a Coca Cola Scholar – he was awarded a $20,000 scholarship for exemplary leadership and social activism. He’s also a National Merit Scholar. Both boys were born in India and moved to the US with their parents.
Currently, Working Together for Change has touched over 3,000 lives. The organisation has also raised some $1,20,000 for its cause, has mobilised some 600 volunteers and over 17,000 volunteer hours. They have organised over a dozen medical camps that screen homeless people for vision trouble, cholesterol and diabetes. WTFC even organises ‘sleep-outs’, to give people a taste of what it’s like to sleep on the streets. All that began with the back-pack-a-thon, their first initiative.
Working Together for Change volunteers at their first backpack-a-thon in Augusta in 2018. Photo: Facebook
Life on the city streets
Nearly 3000 people are homeless in Atlanta. The fact is, as Nitish and Aditya also discovered – many more people in American cities are at risk of homelessness. A shortage of affordable housing, limited employment opportunities and not enough social welfare schemes are all possible causes. According to the Atlanta Mission, some 58 percent of this homeless population reports reports symptoms of trauma and 57 percent have a chronic medical condition. The brothers were also alarmed to learn that average homeless person is under the age of 18 and that the fastest growing demographic is under the age of nine.
The Soods got into action immediately. They rallied their friends for a ‘backpack-a-thon’, distributing backpacks filled with essentials like hygiene products, water and socks. Through this, they also hoped to create interaction between students and the homeless community.
Setting up medical camps to building a house in Tijuana
They also created programmes for school students to interact with homeless kids in housing centres. “We gave them a chance to meet. Everyone should have the chance to have some fun,” Nitish remarked.
Still, they knew that raising awareness just wouldn’t do. So, they decided to host a medical camp. They didn’t have doctors, locations, volunteers or work out the logistics of it, but they began work, scouting for locations, visited homeless shelters and told them that they had doctors and volunteers ready. The Soods also asked their friends to sign on.
The big day arrived with a distressing phone call. The bus ferrying the homeless people had broken down. They had doctors and volunteers waiting at the camp and no patients in sight. “We called every adult we knew to use their minivans to ferry the homeless to the camp,” Ntisih said. It worked. “In the end, nobody left feeling dissatisfied. Today, we host medical camps every four months.” The WTFC teams even went to Tijuana to build a house from the ground up. “It’s not feasible for us to do this but WTFC represents the idea that we must do everything we can to help those in need.”
WTFC-YMCA-MoreHouse Medical Fair 2015. Photo: Facebook
The root of the matter
As the years went by, Working Together For Change made a significant impact, crowdfunding thousands of dollars and setting up student chapters across the state. Still, the brothers felt that all this was addressing only the symptoms, not the disease itself. True change would mean getting the homeless people off the streets. They collaborated with United Way Ventures, setting up camps to help reintegrate them into the job market. They also set up coding camps for teens.
The journey hasn’t been easy. “It has meant sleepless nights, passing up sleepovers and not being able to hang out with friends,” Nitish said. “But when my brother and I started this, there was a fire lit within us. None of what we did felt like work. We were doing what we loved.”
Follow Nitish and Aditya on LinkedIn and Working Together for Change on Facebook
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