“Every child deserves a chance to grow up healthy and strong, with access to nutrition, education, necessary and life-saving medical treatment regardless of their family's finances or where they come from.”

-Links Charitable Trust

MISSION:

Links’ mission is two-fold:

1. To provide quality education for children with gaps in their formal education. These children are below the poverty level and are often at-risk for malnutrition, exploitation, or child labor.

2. To advocate, support and fund life-saving surgeries for children.

HISTORY:

Links operates in Munnekollal, a migrant, below poverty level community within Bangalore where children often suffer from various, often life-threatening conditions such as heart ailments, neurodegenerative diseases, and severe malnutrition. The community often does not have access to or knowledge of quality healthcare, and because they come from across India, are often not eligible for local government help. Because of the migratory nature of their families’ work, children often have not had access to consistent education and are grade-levels behind their peers.

WHO:

• The rural population of India migrates to cities, such as Bangalore in search of better work, income and living conditions.

• These internal migrants make up about 30% of India's total population. In Bangalore alone, there are over 1,20,000 internal migrants who live in dangerous, unhealthy, unsanitary temporary housing.

• To the government they are an invisible population, and yet they are indispensable to the growth and development of India's cities. Developers rely on urban migrants to build corporate offices, luxury apartments and shopping malls, and yet, the people who build these structures live in the most deplorable conditions.

• The communities are vulnerable to regular evictions due to illegal and informal conditions of the settlements.

• The children who live in these migrant communities are the most vulnerable because of lack of nutrition, education and healthcare.

• At their destination, migrants are exposed to many health risks, such as communicable diseases like dengue and tuberculosis, respiratory problems, lung diseases, allergies, birth defects, kidney and bladder infections, and of course, malnutrition.

• Healthcare utilization rates remain poor due to a number of factors, such as expensive private healthcare, conflicting timing of work and availability of doctors, cost of missing hours or days of work, long distances to access services and associated transportation problems, perceived alienation from government health systems in their new destination, and language difficulties.

-UNESCO, 2013

WHY:

Links does this valuable work because India’s future depends on its children. Research shows that the greatest thing a country can do to reduce inequality is invest in its youngest and most vulnerable. Every Indian child deserves a chance to grow up healthy and strong, with access to nutrition, education, and necessary medical treatment regardless of .parents’ finances and where they are from. It is Links’ mission to help children in migrant communities receive all of the above. Links works in collaboration with dedicated NGO’s, the local government health organizations, and passionate and tireless volunteers. Donations and funding come directly from individual donors, and all money goes directly to serving children.