Benjamin Joel
The Potomac School
Benjamin Joel comes from a long line of educators. His grandmother and grandfather were teachers. His mother, an attorney, has taught at Georgetown Law. So when schools closed at the start of the pandemic and experts issued dire predictions of mass learning losses, Joel took action. Together with his older brother, Alex, he founded Intutorly, a free online service that matches volunteer tutors—virtually all of them high school students—with struggling students who request help.
Since March 2020, Intutorly has provided 15,000 hours of free tutoring to 1,200 students in the U.S. and overseas. The service counts more than 1,000 volunteer tutors in its ranks.
“I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship,” says the 18-year-old McLean resident, who sailed through high school with straight A’s. “I thought, what better time than now to create this? It truly is making an impact.”
Joel, a National Merit Scholar and U.S. Presidential Scholar semifinalist, will soon join his brother at Dartmouth, where they plan to continue operating the nonprofit. Intutorly received a first-place award in a University of Delaware entrepreneurship contest, and Joel himself was awarded a $1,000 grant from the U.S. State Department to pay for administrative costs and marketing.
In addition to managing the nonprofit as CEO, he also tutors a 12-year-old girl in Afghanistan whose school was closed by the Taliban. “She’s one of my biggest inspirations because she’s been able to remain positive and resilient,” he says.
An intern in the office of Virginia House member Dan Helmer, Joel competed on Potomac School’s speech and debate teams, and plans to major in government in college. In his spare time, he is an award-winning photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. He works part time as a chef at Roots Kitchen & Bar in McLean and has started a photography project to document back-of-the-house restaurant workers.
“This kid does not waste time,” says Myles Teasley, who teaches modern world history and U.S. foreign policy at Potomac. “He has an intellectual horsepower that is pretty rare.”