Meet Dhruti Contractor | Entrepreneur, Advocate for neurodiversity and mental health, Hand surgeon, and Veteran

We had the good fortune of connecting with Dhruti Contractor and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Dhruti, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
For both my nonprofit and my business, my motivation was my son, who is neurodiverse.
The nonprofit is call Happy Kids Tournaments and the mission is to raise money for mental health services for teens in Atlanta. The idea for the nonprofit was from my older son, Shyam, who wanted other children and teens to have mental health services like he did when he needed it. We have donated to CHRIS180 for the past two years, who has provided mental health services to families throughout metro-Atlanta for the past 40 years. This year we raised over $12,000.
My business is a structed peer mentorship program with the mission to help teens reclaim their agency, build confidence, resilience, and skills for life. Our mentors are specifically trained to help teens who are neurodiverse, struggling with executive functioning, social, emotional, academic, or life skills. However, the program is open to all children over the 5th grade who need help in these areas. My inspiration for this, again, was my son, Shyam, who struggled with building these skills. I found him a mentor who he could relate to and be guided by, and then saw significant progress. I wanted to share this success to other families with these challenges, so I started my company called GRIT Powered.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
My parents taught me to work hard to support my family, practice gratefulness, and to also serve others. They immigrated to this country and came from a very humble background. The biggest thing they taught me was grit. That what happens to me had less to do with talent or luck, but was dependent on my grit. I could forge whatever path I could dream. They provided for me and taught me that nothing comes without sacrifice, resilience, dedication or faith.
I used these lessons as I worked through medical school and residency, significant health challenges in my child, the rigors of the Army and being one of the few female orthopaedic surgeons in the Army. These challenges only reinforced their lessons.
After my older son had near fatal seizures as an infant and then was diagnosed with autism at the age of 2, my life changed forever. While being a full time surgeon and mom, I was always learning and fighting for the best care for my son. The world saw him as different and saw him as broken. I saw his potential and wanted to foster that like my parents did for me. As he grew, his challenges and strengths changed. I worked together with my husband and my son’s teachers and providers to deliver the most effective interventions he needed at each time. When he became a teenager, he wanted to find his own voice and path.
I was thrilled he had found his voice.
The challenge was that he was also not responding to my guidance or providers in his life. I wanted to support his independence while continuing to help him build skills for life. I wanted to teach him how to have the grit I had. I found him a mentor and trained the mentor how to work with my son and build this grit. My son started to build skills, confidence, and independence. He began to see that talent and luck did not determine his future.
I expanded this to include others like my son and brought in other mentors I trained to guide them. These mentees, like my son, made progress on the skills they wanted to build and were finding their voice, agency and resilience. Seeing the success of this approach, my business started from this. I conducted focus groups of parents and providers to refine the strategy and built the business I have today.
I am most proud of the fact that this business is grounded in my own experience and journey with my neurodiverse son. My son has reinforced what I had learned from my parents and through life – that grit is what matters. No matter what abilities or talents someone has, with grit, they can achieve their potential and thrive.
my experience allows me to truly understand and support others families in this journey. Now, I am fortunate to share something with other families that can effectively make a difference for their children.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
In Atlanta, we would hike some of the beautiful trails we have in the city like Stone Mountain, Island Ford, and Chattahoochee Nature Center. I would take them to a Braves or Hawks game. We would eat in Decatur at Gokul and other fantastic Indian restaurants or Buford Highway for even more variety of foods. We would go to a performance at the Alliance Theatre, Fox, or the Atlanta Symphony. We would visit the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park and the Jimmy Carter Library. And we would picnic in Piedmont Park.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My children, Shyam and Arjun, are the inspiration and motivation for my work. I dedicate this shoutout to them. They are both neurodiverse and have taught me that there are many ways to see the world. They inspire me with their sense of self and ability to advocate for themselves and desire to advocate for others.

Website: www.gritpowered.com and www.happykidstournaments.org

Instagram: @grit.powered and @happykidstournaments