The/Nudge Foundation, a Nandan Nilekani- backed non-profit focussed on sustainable poverty alleviation, has received a $250,000 grant from The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the largest and oldest names in global development philanthropy. The firm will use the grant to build organisational capacity, and expand its reach outside of Karnataka.

Since 2015, The/Nudge’s 11 ‘Gurukuls’ have helped place 1,583 underprivileged youth through a rigorous, fully residential programme aimed at job and life-readiness. The youth earn an average of ₹11,500 a month.

At present, he students are offered specialisations across four livelihoods — driving, beauty, plumbing and data entry — with placements at the end of the programme. The organisation has achieved 100 per cent job placements for all its graduates to date. While 60 per cent of the students were unemployed at the time of enrolling, the ones previously employed saw an average increase of almost 40 per cent in wages.

“At present, our annual run rate is 2,000 youth graduating every year,” Atul Satija, founder, The/Nudge, told BusinessLine . “However, the aim is to scale up to 5,000-10,000 annually, and provide employment to them. We will soon add four more livelihoods — electrician, domestic BPO, BFSI and retail sales. Recently, 13 of our students were placed in Starbucks. We have about 65 employers, including Kotak (Mahindra) Bank, Pantaloons and HGS.”

Stating that the grant will be used for capacity building across admissions, programme delivery, product research and tech-driven data management systems, Satija said: “The time is right to bring more underprivileged youth from all parts of the country especially, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, into mainstream career paths by working on their skill gaps. We already have students from Mirzapur in UP, learning plumbing in our Bengaluru gurukul, and we plans to set up more gurukuls outside Karnataka, starting with Delhi and Mumbai.”

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