Introducing our newest non-profit partner: Atma!

In a few short sentences, what does your non-profit do?

Atma helps innovative education non-profits in Mumbai to grow. We identify high-potential education non-profits and induct them into our Accelerator Program for a period of 3 years. During this period we provide them with 1200 hours of expertise, one dedicated Portfolio Manager and three volunteers with relevant skill-sets to match the projects that they need to undertake.

What need do you fulfil and why is your organization unique?

By estimates, there are thousands of non-profits in Mumbai that deal with education and welfare of children. Some of them are fantastic, innovative models. But yet, they fail to scale out of their own neighbourhoods, or their own localities. We want to help these non-profits reach out to more children, and create more change. At Atma, we focus on innovative education non-profits to build their capacity (with respect to programme quality and programme expansion) and scale (with respect to both building the team, and building a larger organization).

The domains we currently work on are life skills, special education, school reform and coaching and remediation.

If you have an education non-profit which is unique and which falls in one of these domains. Who knows! You can be on our Accelerator Program and we’ll provide you all the expertise to reach out to more children.

What do you think was the happiest moment for your organization?

We get happy about a lot of things. We are happy when after joining our Accelerator Program, a non-profit successfully gets its first grant. And we are happy when a non-profit graduates from the Accelerator Program, starts to raise funds independently, and impacts lives of thousands of children.

What was/is the largest obstacle your organization faced/faces?

Atma’s model is one-of-a-kind in India and is human-resource-intensive. As such, we would like to work with a 100 more non-profits, but, currently, our reach has been to a total of 24 non-profits in Mumbai. We have bigger dreams of expansion, but, we are taking it slowly. Building bit by bit.

What are the future plans for your organization? 

In the next three years we intend to reach out to 150000 children in Mumbai and give them access to quality education. We might even look at expanding to other cities, if possible.

How can our readers help you further your mission?

We all need to focus on giving disadvantaged children access to quality education and we need to talk about its relevance and need. Readers can talk and discuss various issues on our social media about school reform, life skills or special education and the amazing work our partner non-profits are doing. They can also support us by donating to us here.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Atma’s life force is the amazing volunteers who walk in through our doors everyday and change our lives, and the lives of our partner organizations. If you have a passion for change, and a drive to do something different, come volunteer with us. We’d like nothing better than have you with us!

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