Ishaan Patel
Founder & President, AZ FTRS
Ishaan is the Founder and President of AZ FTRS, a social impact organization dedicated to closing the financial literacy and career awareness gap for first-generation and marginalized students in Arizona. A high school student with a background spanning finance, neuroscience, and technology, Ishaan brings an unusually wide lens to a problem that is deeply personal to him.
As a first-generation student himself, Ishaan understood early that financial knowledge and career clarity were not resources his community had equal access to. What others inherited through family networks and generational wealth, his peers had to figure out on their own or not at all. His drive to act deepened as he looked closer at the data. First-generation students carry more debt, have less career awareness, and are far less likely to enter high-earning fields not because of ability but because of access.
Determined to change that, Ishaan founded AZ FTRS to bring financial literacy and career exploration into the same room. The program connects financial knowledge directly to career pursuit, showing students what their target careers actually pay, how to grow within them financially, and how to make decisions today that build the life they want tomorrow. When a student understands both money and opportunity, nothing can hold them back.