The/Nudge receives grant of $250,000 from Rockefeller Foundation

The/Nudge, a non profit which runs Gurukul that addresses poverty among India’s youth by offering education and employment, has received a grant of $250,000 (Rs 1.60 crore approximately) from The Rockefeller Foundation, to enable it to expand their activities. The/Nudge says that this fund will be utilized in capacity building across admissions, program delivery, product research and tech-driven data management systems. The program itself is named “The/Nudge Project of End Poverty” and addresses the larger issue of unemployability amongst the Indian youth.

Currently, Gurukul’s activities are mainly centered in the state of Karnataka. They now aim to take it beyond the state and also to scale up the admissions to 5000+ in the foreseeable future. The program involves providing the students with the requisite skills to find suitable employment as well as to learn to manage their lives. The/Nudge also plans to improve on the use of technology to broad base the offerings and use better learning tools.

“From the work we have done over the past 2 years, we have seen that our model works. It is now time to bring more youth into mainstream career paths by working on their skill gaps. We are very excited to have received The Rockefeller Foundation's trust and support for our work. We are looking forward to expanding our reach to other states, providing more livelihood choices and empowering more youth across the country in the coming months,” Atul Satija, Founder of The/Nudge said.

The focused livelihoods that Gurukul offers now under this program are driving, plumbing, beauty and data entry. They not only offer this skill training but assure the students of placement at the end of their training and they claim to have achieved 100% placements in the past 2 years they have run this project.

The/Nudge claims that around 60% of those who got training in Gurukul had no employment before they took the admissions and therefore have directly been benefitted by the program. Of the remaining youth, most of them managed to find better employment opportunities that fetched them remuneration far above what they were earning before they enrolled with The/Nudge.

The/Nudge has a list of impressive names on its Board as Directors. While Atul Satija is an ex-Chief Revenue Officer of InMobi and some of the prominent Directors include Vijay Shankar Sharma (Paytm), Naveen Tiwari (InMobi) and B. Muturaman (ex-MD, Tata Steel) and Umang Bedi (Ex-Facebook) apart from many others.