Seva wins Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s Second District
Rep. Dan Crenshaw has named Amruth Achanta, Rohit Patel, and Ryan Ly of The Woodlands College Park High School and Gabrielino High School as the winners of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s Second District. Their app Seva is an integrated volunteer management and verification platform designed to streamline how organizations coordinate events, track attendance, and analyze performance.
When asked what inspired the creation of Seva, the students said, “As officers in multiple school service clubs (LEO, Interact, NHS, etc.), we experienced firsthand how manual tracking, unverified hours, and lost records made volunteer management chaotic. Instead of serving our community and spending time with our community, we lost time to recording spreadsheet data.
“Like any entrepreneur, we thought, ‘There had to be a better way!’ and we got researching. Not only were the available solutions buggy, locked behind a paywall, or lacking enough features, but the statistics we found were astonishing:
1. According to an AmeriCorps study in 2023, in the U.S. alone, over 75.7 million people formally volunteered between 2022 and 2023, contributing 5 billion hours of service valued at nearly $170 billion.
2. According to the National Council of Nonprofits, nearly half of Nonprofit CEOS say recruiting enough volunteers is a ‘problem.’
3. Finally, the most astonishing one of all, according to the Urban Institute, one in four organizations cite a ‘lack of staff time to manage volunteers’ as a major issue, while others lack tools for verifying hours and preventing false reporting.
“Was this really that widespread an issue? We decided to set out in our community to find out, and turns out…yeah, it is. We found out through various local club chapters at our school and nonprofits such as Sleep in Heavenly Peace, Montgomery County, Kiwanis Club of the Woodlands, and The Phoenix Journey, which all talked about having issues in the past or potentially in the future, regarding verifying volunteers, or keeping volunteers committed and accountable. (Detailed testimonials from school clubs and local nonprofits can be found in the slide deck shown in the attached video.)
“So, what did we do? We made Seva to restore trust, organization, and efficiency in service, a testament to the definition of its namesake, Seva, or Sanskrit for ‘Selfless service.’”
The 2025 Congressional App Challenge marked another record-setting year for the program. A total of 394 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives hosted App Challenges in their congressional districts, the highest level of participation in the program’s history. More than 13,800 students from across the country participated, submitting over 4,600 original apps focused on real-world challenges ranging from health and accessibility to education, sustainability, and civic engagement.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives that encourages middle school and high school students to learn to code, explore computer science, and build practical technology solutions for their communities. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and winning teams are invited to showcase their projects to Members of Congress, staff, and industry leaders at the annual #HouseOfCode celebration on Capitol Hill.
The Challenge is proudly bipartisan and reflects a shared commitment to expanding access to STEM education and preparing the next generation of American innovators for the future workforce. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from the Broadcom Foundation, AWS, Infosys Foundation USA, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2026 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.