No Limits Learning
Mission statement
Our mission is to expand high-quality public school opportunities for all students by providing resources to create academically rigorous, equitable public schools. Our initiatives ignite a passion for life-long learning and foster civic-mindedness.
What we do
Our goal is to provide resources and support for public schools – from early childhood through high school – for initiatives that help students develop new skills, build confidence, ignite a passion for life-long learning, and foster civic mindedness and empathy for all citizens of the world.
We believe that student-centered, highly-engaging public school environments with teachers and educators are essential for families, for teachers and educators, for communities and for the broader world.
At their core, our initiatives are based on the premise that challenging, engaging and nurturing environments within public schools are the way to develop life-long learners who seek to better their community and have an endless curiosity for life. Our initiatives help students become well-rounded and successful.
We also believe that the best way for students to learn is through hands-on, exploration and inquiry-based projects that cultivate students’ own interests and ignite new ones – not for the purpose of passing a test but for the love of the process of learning itself.
Components of all of initiatives:
Authentic learning experiences that engage students
Students are in a supportive environment
Students are academically challenged and held to high expectations
Students strengthen their ability to work in teams
Students see themselves as part of the larger world
Students develop into culturally-aware community members
Students foster their unique curiosities and respect each others’ differences
Who we are
Anna Azvolinsky has lived in New York City for over 12 years and is a public school parent of two elementary-school age children. She was educated in Philadelphia public schools, received a BA in biology from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University. She is an independent health and science journalist and a life sciences consultant.
Anna strongly believes in grass-roots initiatives to better public schools and communities. In March 2020, she helped found Meals4Heroes.org, a 100% volunteer-based 501(c)(3) that gave 100% of funds raised to pay family-owned, local NYC restaurants to deliver hot, healthy meals to NYC’s frontline works in hospitals who were directly caring for COVID-19 patients and has delivered over 50,000 meals.
Anna is fluent in Russian. She believes that parents and community members need to work together and invest in public schools for the benefit of all children,and that multilingual programs through high school are a great way to develop civically and community-minded humans that care about bettering their community and the greater world. She also loves to come into classrooms to do hands-on biology experiments with students.
Ksusha McCormick is a longtime Manhattan resident and public school parent. After being educated in public schools, she earned a BA at Columbia College and an MBA at the Wharton School and currently serves as Co-Founder and CEO of Decameron Technologies.
For the past two years, she has served as Co-VP of Fundraising at PS145M, helping to raise money for initiatives that benefit the school's Russian, Spanish, and monolingual English programs.
Ksusha is fluent in Russian and proficient in French, and believes passionately in the cognitive and cultural importance of multilingual education for children.
Naveed Hasan's family immigrated to New York City in the early 1980s where he attended Brooklyn public schools in District 21 (PS 99K, IS 239K, HS 525K). This foundation set the stage for an education at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he graduated with distinction with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Macroeconomics and a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence & Computer Vision.
Naveed is an independent consultant and entrepreneur and currently serves on the Panel for Educational Policy as the Manhattan CEC presidents’ representative. Previously, he was elected twice to serve on Community Education Council District 3, most recently as its treasurer and chair of its Multilingual Committee. He also continue to serve as chair of PS 145M The Bloomingdale School’s Title I Parent Advisory Council, where he works to improve public education for all students by addressing socioeconomic issues impacting them, such as housing, after school, tutoring, immigration & refugee status, linguistically responsive mental health & academic intervention services and caretaker employment & child care.
Naveed's first language is Urdu, followed by English learned in NYC Public Schools and a good working knowledge of Russian. He is a steadfast advocate of multilingual fluency, with learning starting as early as possible in a child's upbringing and continuing throughout their educational life. This has helped him personally develop and flourish in an increasingly globalized world and he feels it is his responsibility to pay it forward to the current generation of students by strongly supporting existing work in school language programs and helping the system provide multilingual literacy for all.
It is Naveed's core belief that education is a public & common good and community systems that work best are shared in their use, governance & sense of ownership by a broad cross section of society.