With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

DC Generation Hope Mentor, Mukta Ghorpadey, and her family as a young girl

Four decades ago, after some years in the states, Mukta’s mom walked into the only Indian store in Massachusetts. This was part of her routine, one place that reminded her of home, even if walking down those aisles couldn’t quite replace it. After all, it was impossible to pack all the colors, smells, and memories of Pune, India into this tiny store. But today was different.

Since she’d moved to America she’d rarely heard her language spoken outside of her home but today she’d overhear a woman in a lively discussion in Marathi, just two aisles down. Before the moment could pass her by, she introduced herself.

That introduction led to forty years of friendship and was the foundation for the community that would raise Mukta Ghorpadey. This community wasn’t built on lineage or blood but centered on the everpresent belief that showing up for the people closest to you is one of the first ways you can make a difference.

And long before Mukta’s mom entered that store, her family had spent generations practicing social responsibility. Her paternal grandmother was a teacher. Her maternal grandmother was a social worker. Her maternal grandfather was an educator. Giving back was innate in her family, and her mother ensured she knew that early on:

“My mom taught us from a really early age that you could have been born to any family at any time and you were born to this family. What are you going to do with that?”

This is a question that Mukta has come back to time and time again as she’s built her professional and personal life.

You don’t have to have a conversation with her (a quick scroll through her LinkedIn will do) to know that in her world community is a verb. She's spent much of her career in workforce development, helping people find their own passions and the resources to pursue them. She’s followed the family tradition, looking at what she has and figuring out how she can help others get what they need.

She'd been a friend of Generation Hope for years before she became a mentor — admiring the work from a distance, referring student parents to the program. When she finally had to sign up for herself it was a no-brainer and a timely next step in a journey she’d been on for over a decade.

She didn’t take the commitment lightly. She knew the benefits and challenges that came with mentorship, and signing up to mentor a student parent was going to have its own unique set of realities. But all in all she knew she had a commitment to community, to lifting as she climbed, and all she could do was try as she had many times before. And she was immediately impacted by the experience.

Mukta Ghorpadey on her Generation Hope mentorship experience:

I am always in awe of the student I’m mentoring and her incredible parenting. I’ve watched her with her child and she is the most patient, kind, and funny parent that you could imagine. All I can do is support her in whatever way she names and then anything that I can think of outside of that. It feels really unfair at times that a person has to push through so many barriers our society has created just to do right by their child.

Mukta’s mentee, Sahdari Simmons, is no stranger to hard work. She’s currently a student at Trinity Washington University and has given everything to create a better life for her and her daughter. While pursuing her degree in Business Administration, she’s also an entrepreneur, runs a business that hosts events in the DC community, and does spoken word all while showing up as a mom day in and day out.

In her time with Sahdari, Mukta's already shown up in so many different ways, listening to and guiding her as she pursues a degree. When her mentee was facing an emergency and needed help, Mukta reached out to her own community to raise the funds. She never thought twice about whether or not it was her problem to solve, but she knew that the community she’d built over a lifetime would show up when her mentee needed it most – and they did.

With so much going on in the world, it's easy to feel like there's too much to overcome, like nothing you do could possibly make a difference. You don't need millions of dollars or every resource in the world to change a life — you just have to be willing to lean in and commit to finding and being in community with others. And that can show up in so many different ways.

Raising a thousand dollars without a second thought. Showing up week after week. Or just being a witness to someone else's journey. And if Mukta, and her family's story has taught us anything, it's that community is important and showing up is imperative. It is our responsibility to always ask ourselves: what do I have, and how can I use it to lift up others?