Make a Difference was the first organization that built a successful year-long youth-led volunteering model in India. They are leaders in getting people in a community to take collective ownership of a social issue and work collaboratively to identify the solution, mobilize the resources and implement the solution, while delivering groundbreaking results in the sector.

Every single full-time employee at MAD, including the ones that deliver the service model, started with the organization as a volunteer. Volunteers are selected from communities where the beneficiaries are located.

They have also created a web of MAD communities and MAD alumni networks of children. This network provides support, mentoring, and guidance to children in CCIs and ensures that no MAD alumni will ever be an orphan again.

90% of the children MAD works with can break the cycle of poverty, go to college, and become contributing members of society. MAD focuses on the depth, not the breadth, of its organizational impact. MAD learned that incremental improvements or micro indicators were not meaningful measures of impact. This revelation informed the development of their Age Transitional Model, which features important benchmarks throughout the program to ensure that children are meeting key impact measures, including:

• Youth-reported improvements in confidence, motivation, and increased self-reliance
• In the 2019-2020 academic year, 93% of beneficiaries passed 12th standard examinations (compared to 25% baseline)
• 72% of beneficiaries who graduated in 2020 went on to pursue higher education (compared to 15% baseline)
• 100% job placement in the formal sector among 2020 graduates, with fair wages (compared to 60% baseline)

MAD’s model is the first continued, high-touch support for children living in CCIs in India. Unlike other organizations in the sector — which focus on either basic needs or low-touch interventions — MAD’s community-based approach is built to be sustainable in the long-term by mobilizing volunteers to build a comprehensive support system for these vulnerable children. MAD has been innovative in terms of its creation of a network of trained volunteers that work with vulnerable youth and fundraise for the organization, making it an incredibly cost-effective and self-sustaining organization. They use technology as a critical tool for their growth and development.

Unlike other organizations, MAD provides sustained support to youths in their program through young adulthood, up to age 28. This component of their Age Transition Model recognizes the challenges associated with transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood and provides meaningful assistance to youths as they make that transition.

MAD’s low-cost model is self-organizing and regenerative and has been successfully replicated across India, serving 60 communities in 23 cities across the entire country. Although the model has only been replicated domestically thus far, MAD’s approach was successfully implemented across incredibly diverse regions of India which is a testament to the larger transferability of the model.

Several organizations have emulated MAD’s model of developing scaled networks of volunteers to help address pressing social problems in other communities, making it a leader in the field. MAD was instrumental in helping other India-based organizations like U&I Trust and Bhumi who are working on different social challenges build out their volunteer networks. Today, Bhumi is one of India’s largest volunteering networks. MAD has developed a Community Organizing Methodology that they plan to share with the larger sector and they are developing a mobile app that will help other social sector organizations set up and mobilize their own volunteer networks to achieve meaningful change in their communities