Posted on

How Indian investors and entrepreneurs abroad are pooling in funds to help their homeland

Daily wage earners walking back to their villages in India

India has a population of 1.3 billion and countless daily wage workers are stranded, jobless and hungry. Migrant workers, including teenagers, are walking all the way back home to their villages (sometimes over 50 miles away) and their entire families are starving and in dire need of help.

Indian entrepreneurs and startup investors living abroad all around the world — from Silicon Valley in the West to Hong Kong in the East — have come together in solidarity to urgently raise a US$1M #Covid19IndiaFund to meet the immediate and urgent needs of the most vulnerable families in rural India. 

Prominent entrepreneurs, investors, tech executives and celebrities, such as Craig of Craigslist, Joanne Wilson, Padmasree Warrior, Mira Nair, Shekhar Kapur, Ranvir Shorey, Arlan Hamilton, Nakul Mandan, Nora M. Denzel, have supported #Covid19IndiaFund through donations and/or social media shares. 

With very little action, we can literally save lives in India! In India, our dollars can go incredibly far. With only US$30, we can give food and hygiene kits to a family to survive for a whole month.

Food and hygiene kits

After evaluating several options, we have selected American India Foundation (AIF) as our partner non-profit of choice. They already have a vast infrastructure in place, including 300-plus staff members in India, and they will provide us with a transparent impact report a few weeks after the fund deployment.

AIF is a top-rated 501(c)(3) non-profit with corporate partners such as Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Dell and IBM, and board members such as Mastercard’s President & CEO Ajay Banga.  

AIF has already been active on the field (press coverage by India Today and The Economic Times), and our fund will help them further reach hundreds of thousands of Indians in dire need of help. 

This is a race against time, and we hope that you will donate whatever you can afford. Every penny counts! The campaign page transparently describes where your money will go. All donors will get receipts for tax deduction under Section 501(c)(3) of US Internal Revenue Code as well as an impact report post fund deployment.

We hope that you will donate whatever you can afford and invite your friends to contribute. Sharing campaigns on social media can increase our donations by as much as 350 per cent.

Here’s a template you can use: 

Countless daily wage workers are jobless & hungry in India amidst #COVID19 lockdown. Please donate & invite your network to contribute to $1M #Covid19IndiaFund https://bit.ly/Covid-19IndiaFund. Help 25k+ vulnerable families in India with food/survival kits and medical help!

We sincerely appreciate your consideration!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact any of us active volunteers: Ashish Aggarwal (San Francisco), Charu Sharma (San Francisco), Mohan Belani (Singapore), Pritish Sanyal (Hong Kong), Syed Musheer Ahmed (Hong Kong).

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. Become a thought leader in the community and share your opinions or ideas and earn a byline by submitting a post.

Join our e27 Telegram group, or like the e27 Facebook page.

The post How Indian investors and entrepreneurs abroad are pooling in funds to help their homeland appeared first on e27.