Gloria Benny is an exceptional woman. During her childhood and youth, she was educated in Saudi Arabia enjoying a safe and secure environment. She later entered the University of Cochin where she discovered a very different world. The university was a place for self-improvement, but the history of the people she met in the city was very different. In 2003 during a visit to an orphanage, Gloria and her companions understood that society suffers from poverty because people do not have the tools to get out of it. The solution? For Gloria, the answer was to provide opportunities for children through education. However, the proposal that came up was definitely innovative.
Gloria Benny and her friends Jithin Nedumala, Sujith Varkey, Kavin KK, Santosh Babu and Jithin John Varghese were determined to give some of their knowledge to the children of Cochin. But it was not enough to disseminate general knowledge, but it was a question of teaching specific knowledge that would allow them to carry out a special job. Indeed, Gloria and her classmates had knowledge that went beyond their university careers. Especially English language proficiency. And that would be Make a Difference (MAD)'s the approach: Teaching a second language to poor children living in orphanages and shelters. The next step was to recruit university students to join the initiative.
The genius of Make a Difference is that the educators are part of a volunteer and the children are in shelters. So there was no need to invest in trained staff or buildings. The resources required were pencils and notebooks, the rest the volunteers would do.
In the beginning, MAD stumbled upon the scepticism of the NGOs: "They felt that we were too young to make a real impact. This ended up driving us and we worked even harder to prove them wrong," Gloria says. What the NGOs didn't have was the perseverance of these young entrepreneurs and Gloria Benny's love for children. MAD was founded in 2006 and in 2008 won the Ashoka Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Award. The strength of MAD's youth is their perseverance and tenacity. Subsequently, the exponential growth of MAD led the organization to start hiring staff in 2010. Today, MAD's headquarters are in Bangalore.
Gloria Benny graduated from Cochin University and immediately joined Google. The new work led her to settle in Hyderabad and with her travelled the initiative MAD. Gloria recruited university students from Hyderabad and undertook the task of educating the children of reception centres in learning of communicational English.
Over the next five years, she worked at Google and, together with her colleagues, consolidated the network of MAD volunteers in Cochin and Hyderabad. However, MAD's exponential growth led her to give up Google and dedicate herself fully to the growth of the initiative to teach communicational English to poor children throughout India.
Gloria Benny and her friends Jithin Nedumala, Sujith Varkey, Kavin KK, Santosh Babu and Jithin John Varghese were determined to give some of their knowledge to the children of Cochin. But it was not enough to disseminate general knowledge, but it was a question of teaching specific knowledge that would allow them to carry out a special job. Indeed, Gloria and her classmates had knowledge that went beyond their university careers. Especially English language proficiency. And that would be Make a Difference (MAD)'s the approach: Teaching a second language to poor children living in orphanages and shelters. The next step was to recruit university students to join the initiative.
The genius of Make a Difference is that the educators are part of a volunteer and the children are in shelters. So there was no need to invest in trained staff or buildings. The resources required were pencils and notebooks, the rest the volunteers would do.
In the beginning, MAD stumbled upon the scepticism of the NGOs: "They felt that we were too young to make a real impact. This ended up driving us and we worked even harder to prove them wrong," Gloria says. What the NGOs didn't have was the perseverance of these young entrepreneurs and Gloria Benny's love for children. MAD was founded in 2006 and in 2008 won the Ashoka Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Award. The strength of MAD's youth is their perseverance and tenacity. Subsequently, the exponential growth of MAD led the organization to start hiring staff in 2010. Today, MAD's headquarters are in Bangalore.
Gloria Benny graduated from Cochin University and immediately joined Google. The new work led her to settle in Hyderabad and with her travelled the initiative MAD. Gloria recruited university students from Hyderabad and undertook the task of educating the children of reception centres in learning of communicational English.
Over the next five years, she worked at Google and, together with her colleagues, consolidated the network of MAD volunteers in Cochin and Hyderabad. However, MAD's exponential growth led her to give up Google and dedicate herself fully to the growth of the initiative to teach communicational English to poor children throughout India.