Meeting each other when they were four years old in art camp, Ankitha Gantasala and Sophia Pirani always had one constant: their passion for art. Staying in touch from there, the best friends created an organization in high school named Painted Hope, where they raised money to support people with rare diseases by selling paintings they made. Despite going to different colleges, they restarted their organization in 2023 to continue helping those around them.

Gantasala, an integrated master in professional accounting junior, and Pirani, a journalism and global health junior at Northwestern University, first created Painted Hope after hearing the story of Sammy Lopez, who was diagnosed with TANGO2, a rare genetic condition. To support him, they documented his story on their Instagram page and sold a painting inspired by his story to put funding towards supporting people with TANGO2. They continued to do the same for different patients and organizations throughout high school by cold emailing rare disease organizations.

After the organization took a break in college, Gantasala joined the Social Entrepreneurship Learning Lab and the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurship Leadership Institute Founder program in fall 2023. With the support and resources of those programs, she and Pirani brought back Painted Hope, this time exclusively telling patient stories through their Spotify podcast — which they record on Zoom to accommodate location differences — and selling prints rather than paintings.

“A lot of rare disease organizations are not represented well in media, as well as in society in general,” Pirani said. “You don’t hear about it or hear about them a lot, or the people that are being impacted by it every single day, and that’s something we wanted to help change.”

When Gantasala and Pirani first started selling paintings, it would take five to six hours to complete them. The prices for each painting sold on Instagram ranged from $20 to upwards of $100. With the time it took to create each painting, they realized that creating prints could be more sustainable and effective.

“We’ve created a few test sets already (of the prints), and they’re in the works right now and honestly ready to be sold,” Gantasala said. “We’re trying to figure out the whole logistics process behind (the prints) before we actually commit to it.”

In high school, Gantasala and Pirani sold paintings at the 2019 TANGO2 Research Foundation conference. Recently, Pirani said that the conference contacted them to sell more of their prints to further their impact in the community.

“There’s hope because there are people like these creative girls who are trying to make a difference,” said Kasha Morris, TANGO2 Research Foundation co-founder. “(They) are raising funds and encouraging research to find more answers, which is so important.”

Gantasala said Painted Hope has allowed them to grow their business expertise, and they plan to use their senior years to dedicate more time to growing the organization so that they produce content more consistently.

“We wanted to give these families hope through our painting and through our podcast because hope is a really hard thing to come around for a lot of these rare disease families,” Pirani said. “We got the opportunity to bring it back for them and help raise money for them to find a cure, so it was truly a really amazing experience.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misspelled one of the source’s names. This has been corrected. The Texan regrets this error.