To help at-risk youth in 3 cities.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW YORK: Uplift Humanity India will send nearly 100 high school and college students from the US to India to help at-risk youngsters in three of the country’s biggest cities learn values and skills necessary to turn their lives around for the better.
The program, which is based on “The Continuation Program” curriculum created by Uplift Humanity India, will send these US-based students to the cities of Hyderabad, Vadodara, and Indore for a limited period of time. This is the fourth year of the program, which sends these students to India in several batches during the summer. To help ensure that what is gained by this trip is not lost after these students leave, the organization hires Indian students and teachers to keep up the valuable life lessons in the absence of their American counterparts.
“Uplift Humanity is the first U.S. non-profit to send American teenagers directly to India to work in orphanages and juvenile detention centers,” said founder Anish Patel, a business student at New York University, in a statement. “I created the organization, while a student myself, to give orphans and juveniles in India a second chance.”
Now just four years old, Uplift Humanity India is a non-profit organization dedicated to rehabilitating juveniles in India. It does this by spreading a very specialized curriculum to incarcerated and at-risk children and teenagers throughout the region, to “give youth opportunities to flourish once they reenter society.”
“The Continuation Program not only stresses the previously learned life-skills, but also educates juveniles and orphans in skills like English and Computer Literacy, in order to better equip and prepare them once they are released from the facility,” said Neil Shah, the organization’s Director of Public Relations. “The technology curriculum is especially important in India, given that the country has been undergoing a tech revolution since the introduction of outsourcing in huge American back-offices and call centers.”
In order to further the program’s goals, US students who are traveling to India are being encouraged to document their trip via short videos, around two or three minutes each, to be created by mobile cell phone cameras or even iPads, depending on what resources the students have at their disposal. These will be judged by “a celebrity and shared through social media,” according to a press release put out by the organization, and the creator of the winning video will receive a $2,000 scholarship for further education from Uplift Humanity India.
“The reason we are hosting this contest is to illustrate to America what life inside juvenile detention centers and orphanages in India is really like; we want to leverage the technology that privileged Americans own and use every day to spread Uplift Humanity’s mission,” said Patel.
But first and foremost, these students will be championing Uplift Humanity India’s motto of “Bring the World Forward,” creating new opportunities for Indian youth who are in brink of having their lives turn into an abyss of crime and hopelessness.
“At Uplift Humanity India, I learned that the people who seem to be the most insignificant are, in fact, the ones with the most potential and desire to grow as individuals,” said Krishna Dosapati, a Vadodara Alumnus from 2013. “Through our program, I hope the juveniles and orphans learned that they do have the power to change the course of their lives and achieve bigger and better things.”
Those interested in more information are encouraged to visit Uplift Humanity India’s website at www.uplifthumanityindia.org.