Ninety-plus kids, one classroom at a time.
What started as COVID relief drives became a mission: getting the children of Jagatpura village into school, and keeping them there.
With the Harnoor Madhar Foundation, we started where 2020 demanded: relief drives during COVID, getting food and essentials to families who had nothing coming in.
The drives ended. The relationships didn't. In Jagatpura village, Punjab, we kept coming back, and it became clear that what those kids needed most wasn't another delivery. It was a seat in a classroom. So teaching became the mission. We ran lessons in the village ourselves, and one by one we got children admitted into the nearby schools, more than ninety of them. Then we mentored them personally, so that admission became attendance, and attendance became learning.
The foundation has a line I've kept close: it's not how much you give, it's how much love you put into the giving.
What it taught me
Ninety admissions is a number. The real product was trust: convincing parents that a classroom was worth more than a working pair of hands, and showing up every weekend until the argument made itself. Nothing I've shipped professionally required more patience, or paid back more.
