July 14, 2006

Juggling Act

Kirthiga Reddy finds the time to give back
as a volunteer for Hands on Bay Area

By Carol Rosen
Staff Writer

Kirthiga Reddy has been a volunteer since her teen years.

But several years ago, after she had her first child, she gave up her volunteer work because it was too hard to volunteer once a week, work a full time job and still have time for her family.

Three-year-old Assna Reddy plants native California plant seeds during a recent Hands On Bay Area volunteer experience at Stanford University.

Nine months ago that changed. Reddy now can volunteer whenever she wants for as long as she wants and even take her children along, all thanks to a group called Hands On Bay Area.

“I was lamenting to a work colleague, after I’d had my second child that I had no time to volunteer. I’d volunteered in high school and college. In college I founded a computer users group in India and helped people get familiar with computers,” she said.

When she moved here, and before she started business school at Stanford, she spent part of her Thursdays volunteering in the library at the Lucile Packard Hospital.

Once she started working at Good Tech, a wireless software startup company, her colleague mentioned a group she had worked with in Chicago. “She said it was a great organization that was geared towards working people who wanted to spend a couple of hours volunteering here and there. I went to the orientation and I’ve been doing it ever since,” Reddy said.

The organization provides a number of different activities, she said, from English as a second language, to soup kitchens, to planting flowers, to hosting parties for the Grandparents Resource Center.

“My husband helps too,” she said. “He’s very supportive. He takes care of things so I get to volunteer.”

One of the perks of Hands on Bay Area is that she can take her two daughters, 3-year-old Assna and 12-month-old Ariya, with her to some of the sessions. For example, last week the three worked for Magic, which promotes California and native plants. They joined about 10 others at the Stanford University campus and planted 17,000 packets of seeds in about three to four hours.

Volunteers go to the location and get instructions from a Hands On team manager who sets up and works out the volunteer session. “We worked as an assembly line in teams,” she said. “The plants we planted will live for centuries and my daughters can show their children where they planted flowers.”

It also allows her daughters to grow up volunteering, which Reddy thinks is a very good thing to do.

“Volunteering is something I enjoy doing. I always have the sense of what goes around comes around. This is my way of saying thanks for all the good things I have,” Reddy said.

In addition, she said that every time she volunteers she gets “a feeling that I’ve made a difference.”

Reddy said she benefits from meeting all kinds of people with different backgrounds and different economic levels who are different ages and come from different countries. For example, when she works with the agency as an ESL volunteer, many people tell her stories about where they came from to boost their English.

“I grew up in India where I was taught English as a first language,” said Reddy, making it easy for her to transfer those skills to others. Reddy also attended an engineering college in Nanded, India where she received bachelors and masters degrees in computer engineering. She also received an MBA from Stanford.

Through Hands On Bay Area, Reddy has a chance to work with about 300 different non-profit agencies. “I’ve gotten to know so many different organizations and people,” she said. “I’ve done a couple twice. But even if I volunteer every week, I still have a long way to go to do each more than once.”

So far she said she’s loved every activity she’s done. But if she doesn’t like what she’s doing, “it’s only for a few hours and I don’t have to do it again. Typically Hands On Bay Area makes it a treat to be a volunteer.”