Venil Ali, Teach For India City Director of Mumbai talks about her journey and her passion for working with kids and how the power of the collective is what it will take to bridge the gap of education inequity in our country.
Venil Ali would have never imagined that she was destined to work towards improving the state of education in her country.
Throughout school she was (like most of her peers) focused on herself – family, academics, goals and dreams. So when, as a part of her B.Sc. Honors program at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, she was required to do 60 hours of social work – her initial reaction was to just get it over with.
“After college hours, I’d have to go to an organization called V-Care near my house and teach kids who had come from different parts of India for cancer treatment for two hours every day. The idea was to bring them up to speed with their academics since they were obviously missing out on school. That’s when I realized how much I enjoyed working with kids and ended up volunteering 400 hours instead of the assigned 60 hours by the end of my graduation!” she remembers with a smile.
