Head Held High Foundation celebrates 10 years of serving marginalized rural communities

- The not-for-profit organisation will launch an idea sharing platform titled 'The Power of Possibilities' to mark the milestone and facilitate collective goal setting for the next decade

BENGALURU, India, Nov. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Head Held High Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation working towards poverty alleviation and empowerment of rural youth and communities, completes a decade of impact this year.

The NGO is now looking to leverage the lessons of the first ten years to set more ambitious goals for the next ten. A collaborative approach that draws on the strengths of the entire ecosystem is key to enabling this. To coincide with its 10^th anniversary on November 30, Head Held High is launching a year-long campaign titled 'The Power of Possibilities'. With regular panel discussions, program insights and community-centric solutions, the campaign will engage current and potential partners in answering the question: what can we collectively work towards in the next decade?

In the past decade, Head Held High has reached more than 200,000 rural youth with interventions focused on training, skilling, mentoring, and livelihood development. It runs these interventions in 100+ districts across India, many of them in places that are lagging with respect to key socio-economic indicators.

Rural women are another demographic that Head Held High aims to impact and represent 80% of the youth in its core training programs. One exciting new initiative that it plans to launch in the upcoming year is a program to support 10,000 rural women entrepreneurs. Called One for One, the program will be funded by donations from individuals who will also mentor the women for success in their ventures. Each donor or ambassador will play a vital role in transforming the rural woman at the other end.

Speaking of the impact of the last decade and the objectives of the campaign, Madan Padaki, Co-founder and Managing Trustee at Head Held High Foundation said, "Our transformation thesis at Head Held High Foundation is based on empowering individuals to realize their potential. What begins as a small change in their financial circumstances eventually leads to more transformative shifts in terms of how they view themselves and their roles within their families and communities. The stories of change that we hear on a daily basis tell us that we are on the right track. This is an appropriate time for us to be looking at exponentially scaling our impact through partnerships and with approaches that leverage different parts of the changemaking ecosystem. We are looking forward to exploring this through the 'Power of Possibilities' campaign."

The first of the conversations in the series ('Unleashing Youth Potential') is also slated for Nov 30. It is likely to feature social, economic and policy perspectives from a speaker panel that includes Arun Maira (Consultant and Former Member, Planning Commission of India), Reema Nanavati (Director, SEWA), Dr R Balu (Member-HR, Capacity Building Commission, Govt of India) and Madan Padaki (Managing Trustee, Head Held High Foundation).

About Head Held High:

Head Held High is a Bangalore-based not-for-profit organisation that works in the area of poverty alleviation -- primarily in rural India -- through soft skills training, career guidance and counselling, and entrepreneurship support. The work is driven by the vision of achieving a world of abundance for all --one in which poverty has no place. Besides the co-founders -- Rajesh Bhat, Madan Padaki and Sunil Savara -- the Head Held High Board of Trustees also includes Vivek Talwar (formerly Head of CSR at Tata Power) and Simon Newman (a banking sector leader who was formerly with Prudential UK). The NGO was incorporated as a trust in 2011, although it had begun running a version of its flagship youth transformation program prior to that in parts of Karnataka.

Website: www.head-held-high.org