Founded 2006 | Area served India | |
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Founders Jithin John Varghese, Santosh Warrier, Kavin KK, Gloria Benny, Jithin Nedumala, Sujith Varkey Type Non-Profit Society. Registered 80G / 12A Focus Equitable outcomes for children in shelters Location Bangalore, Karnataka, India | ||
Make A Difference (MAD) is an Indian non-profit organisation, working to ensure better outcomes for children in orphanages and shelters across India. Make a Difference works with nearly 5000 children in 77 shelter homes across 23 cities in India, delivering impact through a Fellow-managed volunteering model of 4000 young leaders. It is currently run by Rizwan Tayabali and Jithin C Nedumala. Make A Difference is also the only non-profitable organisation to rank in India's Top 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015 by the Great Place to Work Institute.
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Through four core programmes, Ed Support, Discover, Propel and Dream Camps, Make a Difference creates a support system and an emotional safe space for children in shelters by ensuring every child has at least 3 adults who care for them, understand them and who they can reach out to when they feel overwhelmed. They have access to volunteers from 2 to 10 hours a week from the age of 10 onwards. Trained mentors spend time getting to know and develop individual plans for each child. This plan includes not just academic support but also life skills, personal discovery, art, music and language lessons. Depending on the age and need of the child, programmes include career awareness activities, helping them transition to better schools, helping them identify their career path and funding it when required. Make A Difference also works closely with the shelter they are living in to ensure that basic needs are taken care of and that the broader developmental needs of the children are being met.
Make A Difference is registered in Cochin, with a core team based in Bangalore, and operations spread across the Indian cities of Cochin, Mangalore, Coimbatore, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai, Vellore, Bangalore, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Bhopal, Gwalior, Guntur, Dehradun, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mysore.
History
The creation of Make A Difference was driven by Jithin Nedumala and Sujith Varkey's experience of visiting a shelter for underprivileged children in Cochin, and the realisation that children leaving the shelter were unable to break their cycle of poverty. Gloria Benny's keen interest in helping with the endeavour proved a catalyst in it growing into a youth volunteer network from a pet project. Their friends Kavin K K, Santosh Babu and Jithin John Varghese were instrumental in founding and fleshing out the concept of Make A Difference, and the six of them formed a founding team around which friends, peers and the community came together to make the organisation a reality.
The first generation of Make A Difference, started with the recruitment of teachers via a presentation made by Jithin, Sujith and Kavin to friends and peers in 2006. Approximately 20 volunteers signed up, and the first chapter of MAD was set up in Cochin, soon after which the organisation formally registered as a non-profit society.
From that point on, Make A Difference grew exponentially. Others to have played seminal roles in the growth and success of Make A Difference have been Samarth Agarwal who served as CEO from 2011-12, Sanjana Kuruvilla who has been on the board since 2008; and most recently Rizwan Tayabali who redesigned and restructured both the solution and the organisation to focus on macro outcomes.
Make A Difference remained completely volunteer driven until 2010, when the size and complexity of operations drove the need for a full time workforce to provide strategic and operational support for city teams around the country. This was the same year that Michelle Obama chose Make A Difference to be one of the four non-profits she visited on her trip to India.
Recognition and awards
MAD has consistently won awards for excellence, including