About The Foundation in , Mumbai

Founder’s Philosophy
“While there are a thousand manifestations of evil on this planet, perhaps the single most instinctive evil is discrimination. We do not like the other. They make us uncomfortable. So, we differentiate between the young and the old, women and men, the mentally able and the mentally challenged. We treat the poor, the uneducated, the dark-skinned, the transvestites, the ‘lower castes’, and the physically challenged, with contempt. The Foundation has, as its one-point agenda, the endeavour to remove all kinds of discrimination from our lives, our country, and our world. Clearly this is a massive mountain to climb. We will start small, we may even stay small, but the work we will do will be intelligent, focused, uncompromising, consistent and full of love.” - Rahul Bose

Vision & Mission
Our vision is to see a world free of discrimination of all forms. We seek to realize this vision through the tool of education to create awareness, up skill and influence policy.

REACH
Our spearhead program, REACH (Restoring Equality through the Education & Advancement of Children) is an educational initiative that provides full 15-year scholarships from Std 6 up until employability for underprivileged students to the most appropriate schools of the highest standard. Emotional resilience, ability to adapt, special skill sets, sports, cultural abilities and academics are factors weighted equally in the selection process. In 2007, the first area we chose to select students from was the Andaman and Nicobar islands. The immense geographical divide between the mainland and the archipelago has left the islanders with an ingrained sense of separateness at best, a sense of inferiority at worst. Six children , all 11 years of age, from the region– Matrena, Bindu, Pratima, Rukhsar, Jinu and Animesh, were selected after a 14-month selection process. They joined Std 6 in Rishi Valley Schoolnear Bangalore, the country’s top ranked boarding school. Today they are 19 years old and are studying in the top colleges in Mumbai.

In 2011 we launched REACH II in the Kashmir Valley. The Kashmir initiative had its own challenges. The threat of militancy (bombs went off in Lal Bazaar in Srinagar on one of our trips), distance (braving treacherous roads, our team reached the Indo-Pak border with application forms), and orthodoxy (the school chosen for this scholarship initiative is co-educational), six children – four girls and two boys- Yousra, Sheeba, Muqadas, Arbeena, Sarhan & Aasif were selected. Starting in Std 6 at the Sahyadri School (a sister school of Rishi Valley), in the district of Pune, they are going to go into Std 8 now.

The next region REACH moves to is Manipur. Where better to start bridging the divide between the two Indias than in the classroom. Our dream is to nurture 100-150 children from different parts of the country going out of their communities into the world, educated, informed and full of the knowledge that the world can be one, so that they in turn will never shy away from walking up to the forgotten, taking them by the hand and setting them on a deeper, richer journey.

HEAL
The Foundation has chosen to work in the area of Child Sexual Abuse(CSA) due to the prevalence of CSA and the stigma, self or socially inflicted, that survivors experience. Our vision is to ease discrimination practiced by the community towards survivors and the self discrimination survivors experience.

The program was started in 2008 and is a three-pronged effort that involves:
• Awareness building
• Providing practical rehabilitation to those who have been victimized.
• Advocating for policy development

HEAL creates a dialogue with parents and teachers to address the myths surrounding sexual abuse and also to help them deal with any situation of abuse faced by children. For a child, parents and teachers are the two sets of adults whom he/she can trust and seek support from. Thus it places an immense responsibility in their hands of protecting them.

HEAL involves dialogue about CSA with school principals, teachers and parents. Workshops are being held in various schools to help teachers and parents understand CSA, identify cases, learn preventive techniques and also know where they can turn for help.