The/Nudge, which is backed by Nandan Nilekani and Tata Trusts, has now received a grant of around ₹1.6 crore ($250,000) from The Rockefeller Foundation — one of the oldest foundations in global development philanthropy.
According to Atul Satija, founder of The/Nudge, this grant will allow them to significantly scale their projects and will bring “a lot more interest in the work they were doing”.
Commenting on this, Ashvin Dayal, MD for Asia in Rockefeller Foundation, said,
Intervention by The/Nudge Project of End Poverty attacks the root causes of unemployability among India’s youth and the team has an impressive track record in equipping and supporting the underprivileged youth in hard as well as soft skills that allow them to thrive.
The flagship program coming out of The/Nudge is lagship program is Gurukul, which is a 100-day residential program for underprivileged youth aimed at job and life-readiness.
Participants are trained in driving, beautician services, office administration and sales management or plumbing. They also learn communicative English, numeracy, digital literacy, financial literacy and life foundation.
Currently, the organisation has around 11 gurukuls, each one of them is sponsored by a corporate entity. They are now planning to expand these gurukuls to other states and to other areas of livelihood. Among the proposed, Delhi and Mumbai are the top cities and specialisations in electricals, retail sales, and BFSI (banking, financial services & insurance) sales are expected to be started.
The Rockefeller Foundation is one of the core partners of the newly setup philanthropic venture Co-Impact that plans to invest around $500 million in three critical areas – health, education and economic opportunity.