Do a little. Change a lot.

Join the community that improvise on education, employability and healthcare, one day and one rupee at a time. More

Who we are?

The group consists of young engineering and management graduates who have just stepped onto the professional world. Among other things, a shared commitment to make a positive change unites us. The member base is currently spread across USA and India.

Coloring Lives is a community of “change-desiring-salaried-middle-class-individuals”. Pool resources (monetary/ intellectual/physical) of such contributors and vest the power back to them in planning, deciding, and driving projects/contributions. This way they are active, committed, and group-empowered.

You can find the Team here.

Why we are doing?

I am sure most of us, despite our busy personal lives, have often wondered if we could do something meaningful to improve the life of those around us. Societal needs are manifold. Children deprived of quality education, tutorship, basic nutrition and healthcare; Students unable to pursue higher education due to financial constraints; Entrepreneurial dreams stifled by lack of guidance, market skills and skeptical lenders.

Often the first thing is to make a financial contribution. But can we go beyond? Is it also possible to put our skills – IT, creativity, marketing, networking, financial management or just sheer passion and commitment to solve broader problems, where the remuneration is a thankful heart and a truer satisfaction of making a personal difference? And what are the possibilities if such individuals with multifarious skills come together as a committed group focusing on specific local problems?

How It started?

The urge to make the most out of a group of good-intentioned and like-minded friends drove us to initiate and create Coloring Lives. In general, people do not have much apprehension about donating a sum of 1$ a day or 15 Rs a day for a good cause, but everyone’s doubts are about the implementation, accountability, and impact. We call these inhibitive suspicions. Adding to these suspicions, there is also a very low satisfaction experienced when one passively donates to large social organizations. Such inhibitive suspicions and low satisfaction move willing people away from “giving” back to society.

Coloring Lives are instrumental in doing periodic field trips, verifying the authenticity of the recipients, evaluating outcomes and following up on project ideas on a periodic basis. As we want to be thorough in our choice of projects, proper ones often take time to shape up. We also do our best to go beyond funding and put our individual skills to more productive use by coming up with valuable suggestions, counseling etc.

  • Join Coloring Lives community by signing up for 1$ or 15Rs a day contribution.

  • Bring in social projects/ideas or join projects in motion that would create self-reliance in rural parts of India.

  • Plan, implement and track projects through Groups/Forums & active users on ground.

  • Meet new friends and Build your network through Coloring Lives social network.

Our Operating Model

Coloring-lives Foundation, earlier known as Dollar-a-day, is a registered trust u/s 12 AA of Income Tax Act, 1961. We are a group of “change-desiring-salaried-middle-class-individuals” who pool resources (monetary/ intellectual/physical) and vest the power back to the contributors in planning, connecting, deciding, and driving projects/contributions that deliver positive social impact in education, employability or healthcare

What we do is quite simple: We connect resourceful (Monetary support, Information support) with the needful. We do this two major ways :

A. Leverage our Tech experience to build Tech/AI for Good

  • Social media based tracker for Flood support during Chennai floods in 2015
  • Dashboard that showed location specific COVID Hospitals with beds/Ventilator during Delta Wave 2021.
  • Upcoming: Whatsapp based chatbot : Where parents or students query for scholarships/assistantship and the chatbot locates the relevant CSR initiatives and alumni for guidance and next steps.

We envision expanding the whatsapp interface to locate Pradhan Mantri Jan Aushadhi Kendra (PMBJK) for Govt approved & subsidized health needs/ vaccines for the low income beneficiaries, who are usually the parents of students in the Govt schools we associate with.

B.Finding & Funding (F&F)

  • We get 1$ every day from friends in US and 15Rs every day from our friends in India
  • We focus on identifying & working with Highly-Motivated-Aspirational-Gov't school HMs or Teachers from remote villages.
  • So far we have identified 5 such Teachers & Head Masters with help of our 2 member-ADVISOR group - Chitra (a department of education staff & a passionate socially driven person) & Karuppaiyan (a president award winning teacher & our first beneficiary). Karuppaiyan & Chitra identifies for us the right needy schools and motivated teachers who can partner & work with Coloring lives.
  • We make visits to these schools & every quarter we take up projects worth 1 LAKH rupee which these HM's identify for us and which we feel will have a long standing & bigger impact in the lives of these remote-gov't school kids & make a positive dent in their education process.
  • We report back and interact with our donors (1$ a day or 15Re a day people) over 100+ and invite them for our field visits, sending reminders etc, which typically happens once every 2 months or continuation of Step 1 to 4 above.

Follow us @ our website or twitter.com/colouringlives or facebook.com/colouringlives.org