Meet Mayur

Mayur is coordinator of our Sachet Foundation unit based in our Rehab Center. He is also a former beneficiary who spent his older teenage years living in our childcare institution. Like most of our children, Mayur left Snehalaya when he reached 18, finding work with another partner, VOPA who has been working with our Snehalaya English Medium School to help train our teachers.

He then moved onto digital marketing, creating content for websites and social media in the corporate sector. While he loved the work, he soon realised that his passion lay in the development sector. Last year, after quitting his corporate job and actively searching for a new opportunity, Mayur wrote a LinkedIn post about Notion, a note-taking and productivity tool. Around the same time, Sachet Foundation, which was also working with Notion, noticed his post. Concurrently, Mayur reached out to Mahesh Sir, whom he knew from his connections with Snehalaya, inquiring about any marketing or communication roles available in non-profits within Mahesh's network. Impressed by his background and initiative, Sachet Foundation realized Mayur was the perfect fit for their team.

In September 2023, he began working remotely for Sachet Foundation, and later joined Snehalaya at the beginning of this year. Having come back after a few years he noticed many positive changes, especially following the introduction of Snehalaya 2.0 where we have restructured our management teams, computerized our systems and streamlined our work in many different areas.

At the start of the financial year we also restructured our childcare services under our Head of Child Protection, which has seen further improvements and a renewed focus on collaborations, communication and interventions for the children placed under our care and protection. The work of Sachet and Mayur comes under this new structure as they play a major role in preparing children for life and work outside our institution. They develop collaborations and partnerships that provide courses and training with Mayur’s daily work involving one-to-ones with our children to understand their ambitions, interests and skills and to introduce them to different careers and vocations open to them. Mayur stresses how important it is for him that they make informed decisions and have time, space and information to really think about their choices and understand all their options.

The fact that Mayur can relate to children’s experiences of growing up in Snehalaya means they already see him as a friend or older brother who they can have open and honest discussions with. This is further helped by the fact that, in his last few years living here, he served as a peer counselor under our Family-Based Care counselors, proving himself as someone children could discuss and raise their issues with confidentiality. This is where he learnt that being able to listen is a great power to have and he explains, “being present and actively listening are two different things'. He credits our former counselor, Siddhi, with teaching him so many things, including to simply listen without judgment or suggestions to enable children to find their own way. In fact, Siddhi continues to mentor and guide him.

Mayur has already made a positive impact such as arranging a two-day coding workshop which will hopefully lead to a year-long program for our children. Another initiative came when several girls indicated an interest in special needs education. Mayur arranged for one of our former beneficiaries who is now a sign language interpreter to conduct a bespoke session where the girls were able to get all the answers they were looking for.

We are so happy to have Mayur working with us as he also completes his sociology degree. He hopes to continue with a social work qualification and says he will stay at Snehalaya for as long as he feels he is making an impact. Given his success so far, we think he will be here for a long time