Overview

About Grassroutes
Grassroutes is a Fellowship Program which funds youth to go on road-trips for social change. Traveling across India,
meeting change-makers, working with social ventures, learning developmental issues, living on less than $2 a day,
these youth return with stories of social change, and the program enables them to use these stories to inspire a
larger community.

An initiative of a non-profit for-impact society Youth Factor, and run by 20-odd year olds just out of college,
Grassroutes aims to be a novel social venture aimed at driving youth to social action in India.

Why Grassroutes?
The Grassroutes mantra is to use travel as a means to enable youth to discover the change maker within.
The team believes that immersion experiences in areas where social entrepreneurs are battling odds to create
sustainable, significant impact, have the potential to create deep impact on the way we perceive social change.

Inception of Grassroutes
Back in college days, on a road-trip to Pushkar, three of the founders impulsively decided to take the train at the
Tilonia station - just because we had read about it somewhere! As they went around exploring the place and spent
time with the people there, they were simply awestruck by the way the technology they were learning in our
engineering subjects was simplified and empowered women through rural entrepreneurship. They were so inspired
that when they went back, they put in all their knowledge and energy into a few community development projects
around Pilani and were surprised at the change they could bring to people’s lives.

How is Grassroutes the answer?

The team believes that a dose of inspiration combined with the energy of the youth can actually make a few dents
in the universe. Grassroutes is just an effort to bring the two together.

In our previous editions, our fellows studied a variety of problems ranging from Tribal Rights to Malnutrition to
Environment Protection to Women Empowerment. Our fellows have been engineers, doctors, commerce graduates
and working professionals.

Impact is assessed based on displayed behavior of our fellows and not the inherent changes it made in them. For
instance, because of the experiences from the fellowship, two fellows are applying to the Echoing green fellowship.

Following are other Grassroutes ’08 edition fellows’ achievements:

• Anurag Dutta won the Habitat Young Visionary Award, 2009.
• Abhishek Nayak represented the Indian youth at the recently concluded COP15, Copenhagen summit.
• Rishabh Kaul has been selected as a staff writer at Nextbillion.net.
• Raghav Mimani will be attending 1st NMC World Youth Meet in Jan, 2010 at Bari, Italy.

This is the kind of impact we are looking for in the fellows, through their journeys.