Profile: Hopes And Dreams

Leading a sheltered life far away in Saudi Arabia, the academically brilliant Gloria Benny had everybody imagining she would land a cushy, high-paying job with a plush office to go with it. But life had greater plans for Gloria that took her away from a career with a reputed tech company and into the world of social entrepreneurship.

While still in her early 20s, amid family opposition and lucrative career options that beckoned, Gloria chose heart over mind, when she founded Make a Difference (MAD), a pioneering body that thrives on a youth volunteer network of about 4,000 people who work in the field of child protection trying to provide equal opportunities in society for underprivileged children. MAD now reaches out to 80 shelter homes across 23 cities touching the lives of 5,000 children. With a seed capital of only Rs 2 lakh sourced from likeminded friends, MAD was registered in November 2006.

Many feathers in her cap later and plenty of accolades for MAD that included a visit from Michelle Obama in 2010, Gloria quit MAD to found Guardian of Dreams in April 2015. Her need to make a further difference in the field of child protection has led her into a second nonprofit initiative, Guardian of Dreams (GOD) which she says is “focused on the challenges that the child protection sector faces as a whole.”

Gloria is now leveraging her decade-old expertise in GOD, an organisation that is building implementation capacity along with research and resource mobilisation for child protection. “While MAD has been a resounding success, it is still essentially voluntary work. After spending considerable time with children in shelter homes, I felt that I need to delve deeper into administrative issues,” says Gloria.

By the time she turns 35, she intends to bring about better research and awareness — and better shelter homes. She hopes that in five years she will have been instrumental in creating “a more integrated and well connected child care sector where information flow between one organisation and another or to a grass-roots agency is seamless.”

While today she can speak with an air of conviction, Gloria recalls a time when challenges were aplenty. At the age of 26 when she announced that she was ready to quit her full-time job and take to social entrepreneurship, her family could not understand why she would want to step out of her comfort zone. She had her fair share of disagreements and debates that made her resolve even stronger.

The other challenge she faced was in the startup environment. While being a woman worked to her advantage in the social sector, what hit her was that the stark inequity that prevails in the startup ecosystem only caters to the for-profit businesses. “The innumerable accelerators and incubators we approached were not even ready to give us a hearing because we were not commercial. That was quite a revelation in itself!” recalls Gloria.

Taking up challenges however, has always been her ‘thing’ as Gloria says. “The moment I am told something is difficult I feel the need to push boundaries to make it do-able.” So she battled it out both on the personal and professional front, working on the one hand and helping design, set up and scale an organisation that was soon to become a nationwide youth volunteer network.

What inspires to this date is an early experience in fun activities camp that she and her friends had organised as a student volunteer. At the end of the camp she found a child who had latched onto her, shedding copious tears. The child was distressed about the fact that camp was only a ‘dream’ and was never to become a reality for him. That incident was her turning point when it hit her that children like him in shelter homes “have a slim chance of making it okay in life”.

With an incredible urge to protect every such child she set out on a journey that has involved starting, scaling and establishing a replicable model on a nationwide scale and then moving out to put those learnings into action. Her vision through GOD is to see that every child who does not have a family, receiving adequate care, resources and support to achieve positive life goals.

Does feeling so strongly for children make her dream of starting her own family some day? “Not that it is on the horizon, but if I do come to that bridge someday, I would rather consider adoption, as it is the perfect way of building family and a pressing need in a nation like ours,” she says.
“Prepare for a tough journey. Carry a pair of boots, an air balloon and a parachute. You will need them to run, fly and save you from the hard falls. All of which are inevitable,” she says to other women.