Arun Daniel Yellamaty is one among those who always thinks about giving back to society. So he formed Youngistaan Foundation, a voluntary NGO, that organises and engages youngsters and socially-aware individuals and spearheads multiple social programmes to make meaningful and empathetic interventions in the targeted areas of homelessness and poverty, zero hunger, education, and gender awareness.
While growing up with his four sisters under the care of a single parent, whatever little community service he did, he says, continued to live with him. The gesture of helping, sharing love, and caring for those who he didn’t know at all lived with him. “I have seen my mother take care of me and siblings alone. It was hard to raise five children as a nurse. Life was tough, I remember days when I used to sleep hungry. My first job was when I was 18 years, I used to deliver pizzas and then worked at a call centre and saved up money to pay my college fees and completed my graduation and with God’s grace got a very nice job,” recollects Arun.
Having gone through a rough phase while growing up, Arun didn’t want anyone else to go through the same. As a solution, he began distributing food packets to people on the street. Even as he continued to do whatever he was, after getting a job, he knew it was very little in comparison to the need in the society. His stint as a reporter journalist, made him aware of the yawning gap between requirement and available resources. “My stint as a journalist made a lot of difference to my thought. I was able to see ground reality,” he explains. Despite a burning desire to make a difference, he didn’t know where to begin.
He gave up his job as a journalist and started Youngistaan and got it registered in 2014. By this time his food donation programme was a hit and he was over whelmed at the way volunteers turned up to help. “I decided to call it Youngistaan because it was all about community work by the youth.”
He named his volunteers, ‘Hunger Heroes of the Feeding Program’. They reach out to the homeless, with freshly cooked meals and food collected from restaurants and weddings, while the Transformers team provide basic hygiene, first-aid to the rescued city’s abandoned people and counsel and help them with odd jobs.
“I have seen worst and good times, when I saw so many people here in our country struggling and not finding much help. Let it be homeless people dying due to lack of food, children without basic education and women fighting for safety and respect in our country, it hurts. I wanted to use the 70 percent of youth in India to serve the needy. There is a lot more to be done here,” he adds
Within three years of registering Youngistaan, Arun began ‘The Bright Spark Education Program’ a mentoring initiative that creates mindful and ‘caring’ learning spaces for under-served learners (6 to 15 year-old) by integrating fundamental academic knowledge with higher-order thinking skills and vital life skills so that they can become ready for life’s challenges.
