The Portland-based nonprofit Smashing Barriers works with organizations including the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Friendly House. It offers free tennis clinics and organizes charity tournaments. Jiya Mehta and Rohan Shah, the co-founders, started the nonprofit while in high school. They aim to bring the organization to each state in the U.S. In addition to Oregon, the nonprofit already has chapters in Arizona, California and Texas. Shah and Mehta join us with more on how tennis has shaped their lives and their plans for growing Smashing Barriers.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the Portland-based nonprofit, Smashing Barriers. It offers free tennis clinics and organizes charity tournaments. It was co-founded by two Oregonians, Jiya Mehta and Rohan Shah, when they were in high school. Jiya is still in high school. She’s going into her senior year at Catlin Gabel in Portland. Rohan is about to start his freshman year at the University of Southern California, and they both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Rohan Shah: Thanks.
Jiya Mehta: Thanks so much for having us, Dave.
Miller: Rohan, how did this all start?
Shah: It all started one day when Jiya and I were volunteering at a local tennis center, called Portland Tennis & Education. What Portland Tennis & Education does is they have free after-school programs and free tennis lessons. So a lot of kids from the local area go to the program.
Miller: And what were you guys doing?
Shah: We were volunteering, so we were helping teach the kiddos and teach tennis. And what we noticed is a lot of these kids would come to the program, something bad might have happened in their day or they would be a little sad, be a little tired. Then we would watch them come out of the program and start raving to their parents about what a great day they had there, how they feel better and how great they felt playing tennis.
So I grabbed Jiya one day and I was like, “Why don’t we do something similar?” Because at the time, PT&E had the gap of, they couldn’t really help out during weekends. So we’re like, “Why don’t we help out during weekends?”
That’s kind of how it started. We grabbed Jiya, sat down and sort of just started giving out lessons.
Miller: Jiya, what do you remember about that first conversation?
Mehta: It was amazing, like we had talked, we didn’t know what to do at first because we were thinking, we really want to be able to give back to the community because tennis has been such a meaningful sport for both of us. It really felt like an outlet most of our lives. It felt like a way that we could improve our mental health, essentially. And with that, we really wanted to give back to what tennis meant to us, and we were volunteering and we wanted to do more than that as well.
So we hosted free clinics on Saturdays with these children. These children often come from places, from unstable home lives, facing housing insecurity, food insecurity, so it really felt nice to give them a space where they can set goals, learn to be themselves and really just have fun. And with that, we’ve also been focusing a lot on goal setting, not only just providing tennis to them, but being able to show them that they can set goals, they can have aspirations outside of their current limitations, which is really special to us.
Miller: Rohan, what do you see as the biggest barriers in general, for young people playing tennis? I mean, the name of your nonprofit is Smashing Barriers. What are the barriers?
Shah: The biggest barriers are social, economic and racial. Before tennis was very rich, mainly dominated by ...
Miller: … Rich white people.
Shah: Yeah, it was mainly dominated by rich white people, that’s who it was mainly dominated by. And honestly, we really wanted to break that barrier, because tennis means a lot to Jiya and I. I mean, it was my outlet for a while. I used to be one of those kids who would go to programs like Portland Tennis & Education, and tennis was my outlet.
So I realized that a lot of kids didn’t have the same opportunities I had to learn the lessons that I got from tennis – how to outlet your emotions in a safe, controlled way, how to set a goal and how to work towards something. And I really wanted to give that opportunity. So definitely I would say the biggest barrier would have to be economic. Tennis lessons are very expensive and so is the equipment. And by removing that fee, by giving kids their own equipment that we donate to them and also giving the lessons, we are also able to teach them how to “out” their emotions in a safe way, through sport.
Miller: All right, so you saw this gap in what was being offered, starting on weekends, maybe geographically, but what was your starting point to actually turning this into a nonprofit? Jiya, where did you go first?
Mehta: Yeah, first we started with the clinics. We contacted PT&E. We’re friends with the members of PT&E. We know them so well, they’ve given us so much guidance. So they helped us a lot with how to start our organization, with them being a tennis organization themselves.
To start off, we were hosting clinics, we were getting donations, we were trying to set up how to give talks to these kids. We started with the Boys and Girls Club, I believe, and we gave them a talk about the benefits of sports and mental health, how that increases your endorphins, and we gave them rackets and balls to play with. It was super fun.
But we started off doing smaller things like that, and eventually we came to the point where we had enough people helping us and we were working on it ourselves, that we could register ourselves as a 501(c)(3). That was amazing because with that registration as a 501(c)(3), we were able to apply to grants and be able to get donations like that, and have a much bigger source of funding for us in ways that we could expand even further than we thought we could.
So right now we’re in … six states?
Shah: Yeah, six.
Mehta: Which is amazing. We’re looking to expand more, but we have seven chapters across six states, and we’ve been working to spread our mission and push it as far as we can. And being able to start at that one small point of hosting these clinics, realize that we can go even bigger than what we were doing and help more people was great.
Miller: Rohan, what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way?
Shah: Definitely the biggest lesson I’ve learned is how to talk to a lot of people. As a kid, in middle school, COVID year, I wasn’t that talkative. I was super shy. And so when Jiya and I would go to these meetings to talk to bigger sponsors, we would just have to be able to step it up, because a lot of them would just dismiss us at first. They’d be like, “Will there be an adult joining this meeting?” Like we were just like 14 and 15, respectively.
Miller: This is in person, or on Zoom?
Shah: On Zoom. We did a couple in person, but even then …
Miller: But they would literally say,”Ok, where are the adults?”
Shah: Exactly. They would. I think what I had to learn is how to step it up and be like, “This is us, this is Smashing Barriers. We can be responsible with your money and we are also here to put something tangible out there. We’re not some paper trail for a college application or a resume.”
Miller: Was that something that you thought people assumed?
Shah: One hundred percent.
Miller: OK I mean, what would they say?
Mehta: They’d be like, “OK, well, are you gonna stop this when you go to college? Is this gonna help you? What are you doing?”
And I was like, “I started this when I was 14 years old. He started when he was 15.” I had no clue what I wanted to do. I just knew that I wanted to help people. It really wasn’t for the sake of college and it’s great that we can still take it so far.
He’s already graduated and he’s still helping out, so it just goes to prove that we’re really passionate about this mission. Every volunteer we look for, as well. We really look for people who are passionate about doing what we do, not just for the sake of boosting an application, but for the sake of feeling satisfied with helping as many people as you can.
Miller: Rohan, how do you actually find the young people to take part in this? It’s one thing to go try to get funding, or places to play, or people to donate rackets, but it’s only going to work if you actually get young people to serve. How do you find them?
Shah: You won’t believe this, Dave, but Jiya and I went door-to-door in the Portland Tennis & Education area, and we just knocked on doors and talked to families.
Miller: What would you say? So, you knock on the door, I open it up. What do you say?
Shah: Hi, I’m Rohan. I’m with Smashing Barriers and you may not know who we are yet, but we are an organization who provides free tennis lessons, free meals for each lesson and lessons for your kiddo.
So then I’ll kind of just dive into how we talk about mental health, how we talk about tennis, how we talk about the meals provided. And honestly, for a while, I think the biggest barrier to that door-to-door method was language. A lot of them were Spanish-speaking families and I don’t speak a lot of Spanish. So for a while, I had to bring a couple of my classmates who spoke better Spanish than me. And I’m like, “Let’s give the pitch.”
I think one Sunday, I gathered, like, me and four buddies. We all just went door-to-door and knocked and said, “Hey, we’re Smashing Barriers, we provide free tennis lessons, free meals, every Saturday, just come on by at 12:00.” And that’s kind of how it started. And then it started word-of-mouth. So the first clinic, we maybe had like one or two kids show up and then just kept growing. The next one we had five, the next one we had seven, next one we had 10. It was just booming after that.
Miller: Did you feel like you were finding people who had already been interested in tennis and now there was a way that they could play it, even if they, say, couldn’t afford the equipment or the space before? Or, were you introducing this idea to people who then decided they would give it a try?
Shah: I think it was more of, they already had played some tennis, but then the issue was the economic barrier of getting the lessons, getting the court time. Because a lot of those kiddos in that area that we first started with had been going to Portland Tennis & Education and had been exposed to tennis, but they just wanted to play more.
So even after that, a lot of those kids who initially had been exposed to tennis went to their friends at school who haven’t played tennis and were like, “Hey, we had a lot of fun at the Smashing Barriers clinic, and it’s free, there’s food, you should come too.” And so that’s how it started super-spreading, because all these kids would just go to their friends and be like, “Whoa, we had so much fun!” And they would tell their parents, those parents would bring their kids. So I think honestly, once the kiddos thought that it was really fun, they had a great time, they enjoyed their meal and they learned something, then they would just get all their friends from school to come join us.
Miller: Jiya, how have you been able to grow this into other states around the country?
Mehta: We’ve had people reach out to us, and ask us and tell us that they want to be able to help out. We’ve had people we’ve reached out to, and say, “Are you interested in helping out?” We know that they care about the same things. And I was a Bank of America student leader for this year. I met two amazing people and they’ve been willing to start chapters in their own states. So it’s all about talking to people, having them come talk to us, being approachable, and being able to be that organization that’s really willing to step out of their comfort zone and spread the mission as far as possible.
Miller: Has doing this work for this nonprofit, Jiya, affected the way you think about what you’d like to do for the rest of your life?
Mehta: Oh, of course. I really want to go into social entrepreneurship. I love it. That’s already what we’re doing right now. I want to learn more. I’ve been working with other nonprofits, learning more. I’ve been working with Habitat for Humanity, learning more about how they’ve been able to spread their mission, what they do, all of the different branches that they have. And it’s really great to see so many people that are involved in work that’s for the benefit of others and that’s ultimately what I want to do as well.
Miller: Rohan, what about you?
Shah: I definitely think that it really showed me what I really liked about business in general. As a kid, I’d worked in a lot of different types of businesses and family businesses. So, it kind of just exposed me to the parts of business that I was really passionate about, I was really good at. I found out that I was pretty good at numbers. So I think that kind of led me to a more finance-based path.
And then, even then, I’m still getting a nonprofit major as well, that USC offers, because I still want to be able to help other people on the nonprofit side as well as support Smashing Barriers. So I definitely feel like building Smashing Barriers is what showed me what I’m really passionate about, beyond just tennis, and being there for the kiddos as a role model.
Miller: What are your biggest hopes for Smashing Barriers over the next 10 years?
Shah: For the next 10 years, I really want to see … My biggest hope is that we grow into more states. I think right now, the more kids we can reach and the more kids that we’re able to show how to manage your emotions or set a goal, I think that the more kids we set on a better path to the future. So I think in 10 years, I would really like us to see one chapter in each state. It sounds really ambitious, but at the rate that we’re growing at now in other states, I totally see that as possible. And just being able to reach all those kiddos, give them what Jiya and I had learned from tennis, just that would be just magical.
Miller: Rohan and Jiya, thanks so much.
Mehta: Thank you.
Shah: Of course, you have a wonderful day.
Miller: You too. Rohan Shah and Jiya Mehta are the co-founders of the nonprofit Smashing Barriers.
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