How this started.
Beyond Her Limits began as something one person decided to try, and it grew when two friends decided to help. That's still pretty much the whole team. Here's how we got here.
Driti Patel
FounderDriti grew up in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. She noticed early on that a lot of the girls around her were smart, hard-working, and stuck. Not because of anything they were doing wrong, but because nobody had ever handed them a map. The girl who got into a good university and the girl who didn't were often separated by who their cousin knew, not by ability.
That stayed with her. Eventually it stopped being a thought and started being a project. She began collecting the kind of help she wished she'd had at 14: someone older to ask the embarrassing questions to, a way to figure out what was even possible, a little bit of money when money was the only thing in the way. She called it Beyond Her Limits because she didn't want to make anything easier. She just wanted to remove the stuff that was never supposed to be there.
That's basically what we still do. We're small. We try not to pretend otherwise. The work is mostly unglamorous: replying to emails, pairing people up, checking in two months later to see if it's actually helping. Most days it is. Some days it isn't, and we adjust.
Meet the Co-Directors.
Fareedah
Co-Director · Partnerships & ProgrammingFareedah runs the partnerships and programming side of Beyond Her Limits. She decides which schools we reach, which organisations we work with, and what we actually run once we're in the room. She has a habit of asking "is this for the girl in front of us, or is this for us?" — usually right before something needs to be rewritten. The programmes are better for it.
Mahishaa
Co-Director · Operations & OutreachMahishaa runs operations. Applications, scheduling, outreach, follow-ups, the unglamorous work that decides whether a non-profit actually shows up on time. She tends to spot a problem two weeks before it happens, which has saved us from a handful of avoidable disasters already.
A few things we keep coming back to.
If she can't get in, we failed.
Cost, location, language, scheduling around her family — those are the actual problems, and they're ours to solve. If a girl who wanted to be there couldn't be there, we didn't run the programme. We just hosted an event.
One real mentor beats ten talks.
People remember the person who replied to their messages long after they remember any panel they sat in. We try to be the first thing more than the second.
Ask, don't assume.
The girls we work with know what's hard about their lives. We don't. We ask first, build second, and we're usually wrong the first time we guess.
Small is okay.
We'd rather actually change 50 people's year than write a press release about reaching 50,000. There's plenty of the second kind of non-profit. We don't need to be one.
Built with Startscalr.
The website you're on, our email, and most of the boring tech stuff is funded and built by Startscalr. They're a small studio that quietly supports non-profits like ours so the donations we get can actually go to programming instead of hosting bills.
We owe them. If you run something with a real mission and need the same kind of help, tell them we sent you.
Your entire digital stack. Done for you.