GLOBAL RELIEF AND NEW DEVELOPMENT TRUST (GRAND)

About us

NGO appeal from India.
NGO rescuing Orphans, Child labor, Untouchables, neglected, school drop outs and street kids and empowering women & Youth out of poverty seeks partners to help it make a difference...
Lights regularly go out in an orphanage in India due to a lack of funds but the passion of the founder’s vision keeps the dream alive of a better future for hundreds of children...

Smiling youngsters.
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An NGO in India that feeds, educates and provides skills-training to marginalized children and women is being overwhelmed with requests for its services, and is appealing for help from the international community...
The charity operates projects in villages, slums and towns in West Godavari and Krishna Districts of Andhra Pradesh, India; one of the country’s poorest regions...
Despite a growing middle class benefiting from the IT sector, the state suffers from high levels of poverty, with children carrying much of the burden...
This includes extreme levels of child labor...
At least a million children miss school and are forced to work... often in the cottonseed industry where there are health risks...
The state has also been identified as having high numbers of children who are forced into bonded labor, a type of slavery where the child’s labor is offered as collateral in return for a financial loan or debt payment...
A lack of basic services in the villages and slums, including a lack of schools and health facilities, adds to and entrenches the suffering in the region which is spread over a large scale...
As Madhava Rao, founder of the charity GRAND puts it, these deprived children: “become youth who do not have any skills and talents to get jobs. Youth become adults who have not any ideas for their own business...”
It’s a vicious circle for which the solution is care and support combined with education and skills training...
GRAND Trust is helping to alleviate as much of this suffering in the area as it can, and tries to empower those, who literally in many cases have nothing, to help them to help themselves into a better life...
Madhava Rao, a former bank worker for 27 years visited many villages and slums in the district during his work and saw the difficulties facing the children, the young people, the women, men, and the elderly...He began spending a portion of his salary to assist the poor wherever he could, however the problems were insurmountable...
Eventually he realized there was a vocation in life calling him...“I left my bank job in 2000 and worked full-time for the benefit of the hopeless and helpless and roofless...
“My wife, my son and me are dedicated and committed for helping the suffering, starving and struggling...” GRAND Volunteers, along with trustees, founders and supporters work in the community helping those in need, including street children and destitute women...
The charity is supporting thousands of people in the communities of Andhra Pradesh and also runs a large orphanage caring for many children...At the orphanage each day Elementary and High School students receive schooling and breakfast, lunch and dinner. But beyond its feeding and educational work the charity helps care for the individual needs of the youngsters and women that it helps...
Madhava explains the story of a child that Mercy and Grace saw arrive at the orphanage bedraggled, and has since gone on to flourish as a young person and grow into an adult who is a valued member of their team, and is now helping others in need...
A girl who joined the orphanage at the age of seven years old from a remote village...
When she joined her situation was very difficult and she was not clean or well cared for. She had no mother and father, explains Madhava.
“She is now growing well,” he says, “healthy and studying well and helping the other children by cooking and serving food and teaching the children, and now she is 18 years old...” Madhava also points to other successes of the charity’s projects.
“We supplied a sewing machine and materials to a poor woman. She trained how to make new clothes. She is now making new clothes and selling and getting money and supporting her family...”
Madhava says GRAND hopes to expand its work into more educational programmes, creating self-sufficiency, and taking in more street children... but sadly much of their efforts are involved in fundraising so they can simply sustain the levels of service they provide...An unwelcome occurrence at the orphanage is the loss of power from time to time as the charity struggles to maintain the costs of covering their energy bills...
Mercy and Grace hopes one day to fit solar power at the orphanage to help life there run more smoothly...The priority is that the children are fed and cared for though and this continues, even when there is no power in the building...However, some of the girls and boys are discontinuing their education...
“The main problem is poverty...” says Madhava.
“Most of the children from the villages and slums not going to school to get quality education, because poverty. That's why their parents taking them to do work along with them to earn money to meet needs of their family; and their parents do not know the value of the education.
“...our vision and mission is to educate the children, train up the youth and women, build the houses to those who do not have the roof, establish a mobile clinic to promote their health, to supply animals to run dairy and poultry, to supply tools to do small business. To dig the bore wells to provide safe drinking water...
“We are thinking to train up the youth and adults to learn skills and talents like sewing machines to make new dresses, dairy farm and poultry farm and small business...”
The charity hopes to start a vocational training school or college so that it can provide skills like these to empower people and their families, and bring more prosperity to the region...
Meanwhile the charity is inundated with requests for children to join its orphanage, but cannot help all those that are identified as in need...
It’s a heart-breaking situation...
“Many children would like to join at Mercy and Grace, but we do not have funding to help all the children," says Madhava.
“If we get sufficient funds from the donors and sponsors, we will make a difference in all of their lives for better life and to build a better community...”