My Story

Intro

India is suffering of many societal and environmental problems but many young, educated Indians lack the awareness, inspiration and opportunities to understand and address these problems. Meanwhile, there is a silent revolution of change happening around us, at the grassroots due to the amazing work done by activists, social workers and volunteers. Keerthi and his team founded Grassroutes to capture the stories of these change-makers and showcasing them to the larger Indian society to inspire, and challenging them to do their bit.

About Me

I am Keerthi Kiran (Keeki, Keki, Kiki) and I hail from Hyderabad, India. I completed my undergraduate degree in electronics and Instrumentation from BITS -Pilani. My first job took me to Bangalore, where as a business analyst I worked with major retail giants in providing them analytics driven business solutions.

I recently quit this post to lead the for-impact society I co-founded: Youth Factor (yofa). I love the challenge and adventure that an entrepreneur faces on his way to create value. I am passionate about ideas that have a positive impact on the world around me. Other than start-ups, I love travelling; I believe travelling gives one new experiences and fresh insights. I also like reading books, non-fiction in particular. I look at life as a series of experiences and the anticipation of new experiences is what keeps me going.

My Venture

Youth Factor-Yofa is a for-impact society based out of Bangalore, which works on novel projects to engage youth in social change. We started Yofa because we believe in the power of youth to bring about change. We think youth has the creativity and energy required, however young people need an ecosystem or a channel to discover the changemaker in them, ergo Yofa.

Currently we are incubating Grassroutes, which encourages youth to embark on road-trips, discover Changemakers at the grassroots, bring back stories of inspiration to share with the world and do their bit by driving campaigns to spread the change. Grassroutes is a Fellowship program that enables youth to become change agents through transformational experiences. It also aims at inspiring larger community through stories of change.

The program selects youth to go on a roadtrip where they travel across rural India to places where organizations are creating significant impact at the grassroots, meet the people involved, experience first hand the problems that plague our nation and finally, bring to fore these stories of change through new and social media. These stories of change are packaged into online/offline activities through new-age media channels aimed at inspiring more youth into social action.

Since its inception a year back, Grassroutes has changed the way 24 young Indians perceive social change. Having never been an active part of social sector in their life, all the applicants have been introduced and inspired by Grassroutes to run mini-campaigns in their local communities. The campaigns have included awareness about Fluorosis in villages, slum cleanliness with each campaign reaching out to 50-200 community members.
Grassroutes has so far been very successful in capturing the imagination of socially conscious youth. The biggest success and one of the key strengths of program lies in empowering youth with belief that they can be a change-maker through experiential learning.