“Do you know an extraordinary college student? If so, read this newsletter all the way to the end for news about a special scholarship we’re launching for promising youth changemakers.”

In 2015, Neel Ghose, an executive at India’s fast-growing restaurant delivery business Zomato, traveled to Portugal to help his company expand its operations in that market. There, he noticed something interesting. A business partner they were engaging, Re-Food, was working with local restaurants to take excess food and distribute it to the poor people in Portugal who might otherwise go hungry.

“This could be a great model for India, too, to serve the poor,” he thought.

One evening after he returned to Delhi, Neel teamed up with Anand Sinha and three of their friends to distribute about 150 meal portions they had gathered through the generosity of local restaurants. They were taken aback to find that the number of people who needed a meal was at least ten times the number of meals they were prepared to serve. Neel reflected, “These were our neighbors. We had no idea of the sheer scale of hunger and neglect that existed just 10 minutes away from our homes.”

The group decided to gather again the following week and share their experience on social media, which caught the attention of more friends who wanted to help. They started to call themselves the Robin Hood Army. Each volunteer was a Robin.

Within a few months, the Robin Hood Army had enrolled over 200 Robins across 8 cities in India, who partnered with restaurants in their respective localities to deliver excess food to the poor. Today, ten years later, the Robin Hood Army has over 260,000 Robins across 406 cities, and has delivered over 150 million meals to the poor, to orphanages, and to elder-care homes.

But it’s not just the outer hunger of the world that the Robins seek to serve. It’s also the inner hunger for connection that all of us wish for, for the feeling that we, too, belong in the world. “I think food is the first way we interact with people, but [the Robin Hood Army] is not a distribution platform,” Neel explained in a conversation about his organization on the podcast Cold Call. “The idea is, when you’re giving the meal, how do you get to know people, how do you understand their problems, and then figure out how you can give an actionable solution? So, the way we think about it, food is the first step.”

After providing meals, the Robins come back to serve the hungry in other ways — by giving homeless senior citizens access to cataract surgery, for instance, or preparing uneducated children on the street to enroll in full-time public school by bridging their knowledge gaps.

You might ask, how much funding has Neel and his fellow Robins raised to do this noble work?

Zero.

Robin Hood Army is run completely as a volunteer network. Not a single Robin, regardless of the role they play in the organization, is financially compensated for their time. When I was having lunch with Neel two weeks ago, I asked him, “Isn’t this your full-time job?” “No, actually,” he replied. “I make time for the Robin Hood Army outside my work hours.” So does every other Robin. “We have doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, retired citizens. And the golden rule… is there’s no money involved… If the work you’re doing is mission driven, you don’t need to figure out how to motivate your team. That’s a natural thing.”

It works the same way with the Robin Hood Army’s partner organizations. Not a single rupee exchanges hands. Neel and his team have received in-kind contributions from tech companies to develop their platform and their app, from media companies to invite new Robins on available billboard space, and even from Uber to supply free rides. A restaurateur whose establishment supplies his local Robins with food explained his motivation for getting involved. “They are all young, they all have jobs, it’s not like working with an NGO,” he shared. “This made it very real for me, and I wanted to help.”

During our lunch, Neel reflected on his time in college. “I did not study that much during those years,” he confessed. “But college was a time for me to develop some really great friendships.” Friendship may, in fact, be the secret fuel that powers the Robin Hood Army. It’s the ability to look within and honor the sweetness of every soul. To build human connection and draw out someone’s inner Robin. To do so not just with college friends, but with the poor, the orphans, and the elderly, with the citizens of different lands who have joined the Robin Hood Army, and with partner organizations who have shown up to ask, “How can we support your mission?” For the Robins, their work is not simply about racking up numbers so they can proudly announce, “150 million meals served.”

So, what does it take to change the world? Neel’s story shows us that it doesn’t take much money — in fact, none at all.

And there’s one more thing.

Can you guess how old Neel was when he returned from Portugal to start the Robin Hood Army with Anand?

Twenty-six.

Young people bring a certain purity of heart, untethered from the limiting mindsets that the rest of us may be locked into; the mindset, for example, that “this is the way life is supposed to be.” They are not yet set in their ways. They bring a native affinity for the disruptive technologies of their times. They’ll try radically new things, because they have nothing to lose — no years of climbing up the professional ladder, fearing their toil and dreams will come crashing down if they veer off the beaten path. When someone comes up with an out-of-the-box idea — for instance, “Let’s get our friends together this weekend and go feed the poor” — most of us would say, “Why?” But the young among us say instead, “Why not?”

This is why Mentora is launching the Transformative Leadership Academy, a scholarship-based, two-week residential program designed to train college students to live and lead from their spiritual core and advance positive change in the world. Tuition, room and board will be free for all accepted students.

We welcome applications from students who are committed to cultivating a strong connection with their spiritual core, growing their character through daily practice, engaging in a healthy pursuit of excellence, and serving and advancing humanity. We are currently enrolling students only from US and Canada universities; we will offer this program to a wider global audience in future years.

The training we will impart at the TL Academy is based on the model I’ve developed for advancing character and leadership — Inner Mastery, Outer Impact. We are also incorporating practices we’ve learned from the training of cadets at West Point Academy — one of the world’s leading institutions for developing character-based leaders — and the training of postulants in a beautiful monastic order.

If you know a talented US or Canada college student who is a good fit for our Academy, do spread the word. We are now accepting applications on a rolling basis until our remaining spaces are filled. I am sharing a brochure for the TL Academy here.

Warmly,
Hitendra

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