This is all hard work and not just a miracle for UnLtd India investee Dhruv Lakra, CEO & Founder of Mirakle Courier. Recently honored with the CNN - IBN Young Indian Leader Award for 2011, Dhruv created a service driven profitable enterprise that employs the deaf community. Thereby creating respectable employment opportunities for a largely over-protected community with limited career options. This news video from CNN- IBN aptly showcases a deserving winner

While the award brings in much joy, Mirakle Courier also inspired book author Rashmi Bansal, who has to her credit bestsellers like Stay Hungry Stay Foolish and Connect the Dots. Her latest book- I have a Dream, released in June 2011, features Mirakle Courier as one of the 20 inspiring stories of Social Entrepreneurs from India who found new ways to solve old problems.

With the motto of empathy not charity, Mirakle Courier employs a team 64 deaf employees, where each of them has gained copious levels of confidence and is empowered with financial independence. The social impact is that many of them are able to go back home and support their families, rather than being helplessly dependent on them. We are proud of the growing list of accolades and recognition for this work of passion. We congratulate Dhruv Lakharia for not only pursuing his calling but also commend him for being an inspiration to many.

To connect with Mirakle Courier:

Join their Facebook Community and follow on Twitter.

Beyond Profit’s cover story this month is a guide to starting up, outlining the most common challenges that early-stage social entrepreneurs face. UnLtd India is featured in this guide as one of the top 5 incubators that offer advisory services as well as financial support.

We are honoured to be listed alongside Echoing Green, Unreasonable Institute, Rainer Arnhold Fellows and Umbono. Incubators are gaining recognition as a crucial lever in getting powerful ideas off the ground and shaping early-stage start-ups. As more incubators enter the market, it’s critical that they work together to build an ecosystem of support for social entrepreneurs. That explains why we are an Echoing Green Fast Track Partner and why we’re excited that our investees are becoming Unreasonable Institute Fellows.

UnLtd India, the only incubator featured from India, finds, funds and supports exceptional individuals whose ideas, passion and entrepreneurial skills can bring about long-term solutions to India's social problems. Here’s a glimpse of what we offer our investees and the social impact we’ve created so far.

UnLtd India investee organization Fresh and Local transformed the Bombay HUB Terrace Garden as part of its Earth Day 2011 Challenge.
One of Bombay HUB's most unique features is our terrace garden. It's a space for HUB members and event attendees to connect with nature within the city. First installed a year ago, the new terrace garden now reflects their research into water- and space-saving techniques. In a week’s time they redeveloped the terrace space from start to finish. Friends of Fresh and Local who volunteered to join in this challenge gained practical gardening experience and received a sneak peek into the work in progress.

The new garden model adopts methods such as vertical gardening, square foot gardening, sub-irrigated pots, and is accentuated with an organic nursery and a baby tea garden.

On Friday, April 22 they hosted an Open House in the new space sharing their creation with guests over tea and cookies. Visitors to the garden were taken on a guided tour strolling through fruit trees and a crop of warm season vegetables.

Fresh and Local’s Earth Day Challenge was covered in Mumbai Mirror outlining Karen, Adrienne, and Catie’s journey into promoting local produce. As Karen put it “Many things made us want to start Fresh and Local. If you look at the world, 25 per cent of the population is hungry and a high percentage of it is obese. We need fresh and nutritious food in cities today.”

The trio regularly conducts workshops in Basic and Advanced gardening at Bombay HUB. It’s an initiative towards developing edible landscapes in urban settings. To join in the social movement of urban gardening with Fresh & Local team, reach them at freshandlocal@gmail.com

Applications are now open to join UnLtd India's newest batch of investees.

Our incubation support programme provides start-up social entrepreneurs in and around Mumbai with:

• Start up funding
• Hands-on assistance in critical areas like business and financial planning, fundraising, legal structures and governance 
• Connections to peers, experts and leaders

Investee Ashish Goenka's background is in the finance sector. He's got almost fifteen years of experience in consulting, entrepreneurship and finance. And, like many of his peers in Mumbai, he has domestic workers in his home who do the cooking, cleaning and housework.

Once, his maid came to him during a crisis. She “was just not able to repay the heavy interest which the moneylender was charging. I helped bail her out, but that’s when I genuinely felt that these people need much more than just their minuscule monthly incomes.”

Realising that status quo within the unorganised sector doesn't work for domestic workers or employers, Ash launched Maid in India (MII). On the employee side of the equation, MII provides domestic workers with insurance, financial literacy and vocational training. On the employer side, MII guarantees that households will always have access to high-quality help, providing substitute maids when one is on leave. Employers pay MII, which takes care of distributing salary to the domestic workers.

Ash has been written up in DNA's Money section and gives a nice shot out to UnLtd India. Well done Ash!

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Investees Aarti Naik and Nikita Ketkar are incredible women doing important work. They received some nice press on Women's Day. 

Aarti runs Sakhi, an organisation that offers vocational training for women in her slum and supplementary education for girls at risk of dropping out of school. Aarti founded Sakhi because she herself was forced to quit school and earn money for her family.  She now works with more than 40 women and almost 20 girls.  Read DNA's spotlight on Aarti here. 

Nikita also works within increasing access to quality education. Her organisation, Masoom, seeks to transform night schools into academic powerhouses. The fact that night schools are often severely underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced - and that they receive little attention from mainstream society - makes this no small feat. But Masoom has made huge strides, which you can read about on their website. Samhita spotlighted Nikita on their International Women's Day Feature.

Well done, ladies!

Pune-based investees Will Muir and Rujuta Teredesai agree that the traditional approach to empowering women - providing them with education, skills and income - plays a critical role in bridging the gender gap. But in Will's words, “until men are engaged as part of the solution as a positive resource, we fear that the gap still won’t have closed significantly in another 25 years.” 

Will and Rujuta's initiative, Equal Community Foundation (ECF), works directly with men and boys to end violence against women. ECF trains local mentors to become programme facilitators; in turn, these mentors work with boys on issues of gender and self-respect, opening up new perspectives through films, games, events and conversations.

Hindustan Times has thrown a spotlight on ECF in an article called "Dharavi boys learn to balance gender equations." The snapshot it provides from an ECF workshop is of a mentor asking a classroom full of boys, "what different toys do boys and girls get to play with when they are young?” The boys answer answer within a second - girls play with dolls and boys play with cars. When the mentor asks them to explain why - and when we, as readers, have a tough time explaining that ourselves - it's insight into the fact that we all take basic gender roles for granted. 

Photo courtesy of Madeleine Pryor. All rights reserved.

Big news from Cycle Chalao! Founder Raj Janagam is one of 25 social entrepreneurs who will attend the presitgious Unreasonable Institute this June. 

To attend the Institute, the Cycle Chalao! team faced some stiff competition.  They had to be one of the first 25 social enterprises to raise Rs 3.6 lakh ($8,00) on the Unreasonable Marketplace. The race was on, and within just 36 days, over 50 donors pulled through to help them achieve their goal.

Now Raj will spend an intensive six weeks in Boulder, Colorado as an Unreasonable Fellow.  During that time, he'll live and work with 60 world-class mentors, pitch Cycle Chalao! to hundreds of investors in San Francisco and Boulder, obtain legal advice and design consulting, form relationships with up to 30 impact investment funds, and prepare to make Cycle Chalao! a financially self-sustaining, globally scalable venture that can serve the needs of at least one million people.

This is an amazing opportunity for Cycle Chalao! to accelerate its impact, and we're almost as excited as Raj, Jyotika and Jui to see where it goes from here. Well done, team - we're proud of you.

(Photo courtesy of Outlook Business)

The Sankalp Forum is one of the premier gatherings on social enterprise in India. We've partnered with Intellecap, the social business behind Sankalp, to seek out nominees for the next batch of Sankalp Awards - social entrepreneurs who will receive world-class mentoring, significant funding and global visibility in order to amplify impact and bolster sustainability. We're hoping to see as many UnLtd India investees amongst the star-studded awards ceremony crowd as possible.

Interested? Click here to learn more, apply and nominate someone for the awards.