31 Years of Empowering, Enabling and Impacting Rural India
Share and Care Foundation™ was featured in the November 29, 2013, issue of the weekly international magazine India Abroad. Based in New York City, India Abroad calls itself “the oldest Indian newspaper published in North America,” and reaches a wide Indian American, Indian diaspora, and expatriate audience. The features is part of the special multi-page feature “NGO Special: Support a Cause” showcasing several NGOs that are making a real difference.
Since 1982, the Share and Care Foundation (SCF) has been active in transformative work, particularly in rural areas, with a focus on education, empowering women and youth, and providing primary and basic healthcare.
In 2006, its efforts crytalized into unique signature programs, when it launched Educate 2 Graduate (E2G), a four year college degree scholarship, to support brilliant, and driven high-school graduates who could not afford college fees to pursue a degree in the sciences. And the results have been positive and many dreams have been realized.
Dharmesh Guna of Surat, who scored 80 percent of the points in the 12th grade (a standard much harder to achieve in an Indian context), is in his final year, pursuing a degree in technology with the support of SCF funds and donors. His family annual income is $1,000. During college campus interviews, he received a job offer from Tata Technologies Ltd, with an annual starting salary of $8,000, an income his father would have taken eight years to earn.
Or there is Abhishek Shirke of Vadodara, whose father earned $250 annually. Abhhishek often needed to relieve his father at work. And yet, he earned 60 percent of the points in his finals in mechanical engineering. Recently, he received a job offering him an annual salary of $5,000—20 times his family’s current income.
SCF is supporting 720 students at different stages in the four-year college cycle, while 100 students have already graduated due to the E2G program. The program’s graduates are gainfully employed, their starting annual salaries ranging from $4,000 to $8,000—multiple times their family annual incomes. Once through, they are able to help their own siblings go for higher studies without having to rely on help from others or loans.
This is the kind of work that prompted Drs Leena and Nitin Doshi of the Doshi Foundation in New York, to assert that “this program will dissolve the barriers that have been blocking the full potential of a student and a future leader. We are privileged to deeply absorb vision and strategies of Share and Care that are incredibly powerful.”
