Growing up in India can be an interesting experience for various reasons – opportunity to live in constant chaos, contradictions and anomalies every day in life are among my favorite ones. Dealing with ambiguities comes as a second nature to most that have lived that life. There is much to be felt than seen the mystical order in the chaos that one can experience in India. This is powered not by machines but humans.  I have always been fascinated by the efforts and impact of grass root startups  that have rose to the challenge of solving some of the most complicated and critical problems  faced by more than 70% of 1.2 billion people strong country.

For Service Immersion, I worked with one such start up in India called Inkind . Inkind is trying to establish itself as a movement majorly targeting to youth who want to give back to society and have access to resources but lack time and information to best utilize their intentions. Inkind works as platform to connect people who want to contribute and donate to organizations and individuals who are in most need of the available resources. I contributed to the strategy of scaling up to other cities, expanding the NGO network and enhancing the web enabled platform to make the entire process more transparent and credible to end user.

Through service immersion in Smeal and the experience of working with one of the founders of this startup, I am convinced that in people, in beliefs lies tremendous power which can bring about big changes.

Noopur Sahu

Smeal MBA Class of 2012

Penn State University