ARISE

The organization

ARISE stands for Action for Rural Inclusion and Socio-Economic Empowerment. It teaches financial literacy to women who have been left out of banks, budgets, and decisions about their own money, then helps them act on it through Self-Help Groups, bank access, and microloans. It was founded by Rhea Jain, and I am not its founder. I run its technology.

It began in rural Maharashtra with a Self-Help Group of thirteen women who were guided through securing microloans and used them to start small businesses, from tailoring to home-based food services. That group is the model the organization now carries into new countries: learn together in a group, then act on it with real money. Programs run in India and the Philippines today, coordinated from Singapore, with Vietnam being localized next.

Thirteen women in one village is not a rounding error. It is the unit the whole model is built on, and every country we add is a copy of it.

What I run

I own the technology strategy end to end, a part-time role I hold alongside school. That covers the public website, the volunteer onboarding pipeline, and the impact-tracking layer: the forms and dashboards that turn a workshop in a village into something the team can actually read. I also manage the technology and social media teams and help recruit the volunteers who carry the program into new countries.

• WebsiteThe public site at arisewomen.cc, served by a Node and Express layer I wrote.
• SecurityA Content Security Policy generated at boot by hashing the page's own inline scripts, so the policy can never drift from the markup.
• VolunteersAn onboarding pipeline for the Partnership Head, Education Lead, Country Lead, and Social Media Creator roles.
• ImpactPost-program surveys feeding dashboards that show what actually moved between entry and exit.
• DiscoveryStructured data, sitemap, and robots so partners and volunteers can find the organization at all.
• OperationsClaude Code and MCP tooling wired into how a volunteer-run team works day to day.

The constraint that shapes everything

Nonprofit infrastructure has a constraint startups do not: whatever I build has to keep working while I am in a classroom, and the next person to touch it is a volunteer who joined last week and may leave next term. That rules out anything clever. It pushes toward automation, plain tooling, and systems that fail visibly rather than silently, so a small volunteer team can operate like a much bigger one without me in the loop.

The business side

A nonprofit still runs on money and metrics, it just distributes the returns differently. The dashboards I built turned scattered program data into evidence, and that evidence is what a funder actually reads. In 2026 ARISE won a $2,500 grant from the IB Global Youth Action Fund, selected from more than 1,100 applicants across 40 countries, and the application leaned directly on impact data our tracking could prove. The programs this stack supports have now reached more than 600 people, with a 63% average improvement in financial-literacy scores between entry and exit.

Working out what to measure, and then building the thing that measures it honestly, is the same discipline as running a company. It is the part of this role I expect to use for the rest of my career.