“Skilling an individual is like nurturing a chrysalis, it opens into a butterfly and flies on its own”

– Meera Shenoy

In an interview with The HULAHUL Times, Meera Shenoy, a social entrepreneur and a ray of hope for youth with disabilities, unfolded the various phases of her life from working into corporate sector, business media, television to founding Youth4Jobs and equipping youth with disabilities with cutting-edge technology and helping them find jobs. She was born in a joint family in Chennai and had an unwavering value-based upbringing. She recollects her family being a generous one with values of helping people in need.  However,She says, “I never had keen interest in doing social work but I was surrounded by family members for whom giving to the needy was an intrinsic value”.

Upon asking about any moment in her life that drove her into the direction of social work she shared that her work trajectory led her into social work. she mentions that during her work days in television she would write about and capture the lives of the people in villages but this would not give her the satisfaction and she would always say “I want to do something hands on”, and that’s when her tireless journey of social work began by setting up and leading Employment Generation and Marketing Mission (EGMM) in 2004. Mrs. Shenoy considers this as a major milestone as it positively influenced the government policies with establishment of around 100 training centres in the state of Andhra Pradesh for young men and women who later got different kinds of jobs.

While establishing Youth4Jobs in 2012, she was persistent to do something different from her previous works and that’s when she decided to transform the lives of the youth with a prevision expressed as, “When you catch them at 18 years and train them, you not only secure their lives for next 50 years but, also ward off them from social ills like- smoking, substance abuse etcetera”, remarks Meera Shenoy.

On being asked about her rationale and vision behind focusing particularly on youth with disabilities, she shared some striking International Labour Organisation (ILO) statistics with an 80% far-reaching presence of Persons with Disabilities in developing countries like India and the unfortunate observation about the neglected position of persons with Disability. Thus, she decided to work for the betterment of the rural youth with disability. The vision of Youth4Jobs have remained the same over years that aims to help youth with disability to be poverty free, independent, and confident through the pathway of tech training and livelihood creation.

Till date, Youth4Jobs has been successful in impacting the lives of 6,10,000+ youth with disability and over 1712+ corporate partnerships.

Later in the interview she talked about her two flagship Portal and programs – SwarajAbility and NotJustArt and the vision behind it. Meera Shenoy shared that the inspiration to launch SwarajAbility came from the motivating words of the judges when they received MIT Asia Inclusion award in 2019 who asked them why don’t they open a tech platform keeping in mind the kind of control they have on demand and the supply. And then, after coming back to India, Mrs. Shenoy launched the SwarajAbility platform through the active inclusion and partnership with IIT Hyderabad, CII, IBDN, and ILO keeping youth with disability at the pedestal. This inclusive tech platform assisting in 11 languages has transformed the lives of youth with over 2 lakhs registered on it.

NotJustArt is another major flagship venture on which Meera Shenoy started working on her own realising the importance of honing one’s creative skills alongside tech skilling. To support NotJustArt, United Nations and UNESCO partnered with it which gave the major push to the whole idea behind this creative venture.

Youth4Jobs also focuses on the empowerment of the women with disabilities as they are trapped in multiple layers of vulnerability. The organisation focuses on making this burden of vulnerability light by skilling them and enabling them to make money and sustain themselves and their families. Therefore, empowering them economically and socially.  Mrs. Shenoy shared a story of a woman named Lulu who was severely disabled hence was not getting a job. However, sincere efforts of Youth4Jobs manged to get her placed as a vendor in JP Morgan Chase.

Since its inception in 2012, Youth4Jobs has changed the lives of people who were earlier looked down upon as liabilities by turning them into assets and giving them confidence and self-esteem.

Notwithstanding the praiseworthy work that Youth4Jobs continues to do, they too face some challenges especially when it comes to changing attitude of persons with disability about themselves and others attitude about them. People usually treat disability as a curse and finds it hard to deal with it. Also, she highlights that there is a huge digital divide that creates issues in rural skilling. However, it has been more than a decade and Youth4Jobs has been successful in combating challenges like these.

Though, Meera Shenoy and her organisation have received many international and national awards like TALHero India Award 2024, National Award for Empowerment of Person with Disability in 2018 and many more, but her altruistic soul finds solace in stories like these that they get to witness and experience on a day-to-day basis. Meera Shenoy says that awards for her are a sign that they are going in the right direction and gives motivation to her team to work even more harder. For her, “The feeling of a youth with disability being recognised is unparalleled to any award in the world”, says her.

Finally, when asked about an advice she would like to give to the young entrepreneurs, she said “I advise them to not give up and be persistent on the path of their ideation, if you think your idea is great then don’t give up even if it doesn’t give tangible results”.

Meera Shenoy’s work journey is truly inspirational for the youth; it is a perfect blend of practicality and compassion along with right ideations and intent.