I am so happy today, to know that I was able to bring some help to a few who really deserved it. And the interesting thing is that I didn’t have to do much. I just got a confirmation from Deepa Xavier from Prajwala that they got the aid from Google.
It all started when I watched the the TED talk from Sunitha Krishnan about her fight against sex slavery. After the talk, I did some research about her organization Prajwala and I found that they were struggling to build a recue home in Hyderabad for the victims of sex slavery who were rescued by Prajwala. They were about to miss a deadline due to funding issues and I saw that they were accepting donations via a site GlobalGiving.com which charged 15% or something as transaction fee. I offered my help to Prajwaala to find better ways to get donations. I had couple of discussions with Deepa, Sunitha and a friend of mine – Niyaz – and we suggested Google Checkout for accepting donations as it charged the least per transaction and was rather simpler.
As per our advice, they went and applied for Google grant, a program from Google Checkout that will provide free online ads by Google, for non-profit organizations. But they were still in need for a lot of financing, for the rescue home.
Now here is the big turn in the story: On 21st of December 2009, Google announced a gift for a list of selected Google Grant members, an amount of $20 million! The intended recipients list included 25 organizations and Prajwala was at No. 7! WOW… I was thrilled. It came out from nowhere… I sent a note to Prajwala immediately and they were so thrilled to hear the news.
I was following up with Deepa about the aid from Google and today I got a confirmation from her that they got just enough money to build their rescue home.
I can see a play of technology in this story. Like I watched a talk on a site – TED – which was so touching that I decided to do something about it and the least I did was doing a little reading about their activities online – Google – and then I connected them with my friends to get more details on effective ways to get funding via donations; which finally brought them to Google and someone sitting in Google came up with this idea of gift giving and someone put Prajwala’s name in that 25-names-long list and now it’s going to help those people in Hyderabad who have gone through the worst of their lives. There are a lot of dots in the story and it is pretty complicated but interesting how these dots got connected and finally turning in to something really good. I am happy to be one dot.
Though I couldn’t do a big role in this whole story of aid coming from a giant like Google and it helping the lives of 600+ inmates of Prajwala’s rescue home, I feel grateful that I happened to get involved in this. And I believe that if your intentions are good enough, good things will happen, no matter how small is the step that you make. So keep the good work up and “don’t be evil” 
Tags: Connect, Social networking
something good,really good.:)
Really good…!!!
We can do it. We can make this a wonderful world if we really wish to. Only thing we need to do is open our eyes and react to evil.
I really liked this..