Youth for Seva

Youth for Seva is a non-governmental organisation set up in 2007 to build organised youth volunteering in India. It was founded in Bengaluru by Venkatesh Murthy, who saw a gap in how volunteering was channelled in the country.

Youtube Videos

The organisation works on the premise that young people hold significant capacity for social change, and its role is to convert that capacity into structured, repeatable service. Its stated vision is a self-reliant society powered by socially conscious individuals, and its mission is to build and facilitate a movement of organised volunteering for societal well-being. It states its values as Nation First, Pluralism, Integrity, Respect and Innovation. Volunteering is organised through distinct channels, including general volunteering, student volunteering through educational institutions, corporate volunteering, and direct volunteering with beneficiaries.

Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka.

Major Areas of Work

• Education and scholarships: Financial and material support that helps students under financial pressure stay in school and complete higher education.

• Healthcare: Services aimed at communities where health infrastructure does not reach, combined with awareness work on preventive practice.

• Environment: Restoration of water bodies and green cover, with an emphasis on preventing further damage rather than only repairing it.

• Livelihood and community engagement: Skill development and setup support that gives underprivileged people a starting point for earning a living.

• Rural development: Work that builds local leadership and shifts responsibility for village development onto the community itself.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• VidyaChetana: A scholarship programme that supports students with financial constraints to pursue higher education after PUC, with a dedicated volunteering stream that pairs volunteers directly with the students it funds.

• NMMS: An initiative supporting students through the National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship, funded through sponsorships.

• School Adoption Programme and School Kit Donation: Sustained engagement with government schools, including delivery of basic school supplies to remote districts across several states.

• Healthcare programmes: CHAAP, telemedicine services, community health programmes, and Arogya Nidhi, a fund for emergency medical support.

• Swagrama Fellowship: A rural development fellowship that cultivates responsibility among villagers for their own community's development and builds local leadership.

• Environmental programmes: Kalyani rejuvenation, lake and river rejuvenation, and sapling plantation drives.

Volunteering itself is the organisation's core product rather than a side activity. It offers a skilled volunteering assessment that matches a person's professional skills to the places where those skills will count, alongside time-based options for people who can only give a few hours.

Impact

Youth for Seva states it has reached over 36 lakh beneficiaries and engaged over 2.46 lakh people in volunteering across 12,453 seva kendras in India. Its own site describes it as one of India's largest volunteering movements, sustained largely by contributions from corporate and non-corporate partners.

Leadership

• Venkatesh Murthy, Founder

Working here suits someone who wants breadth rather than a single narrow speciality. The organisation runs across five sectors at once, so staff deal with schools, clinics, lakes, skill centres and villages in the same portfolio, and much of the work is about designing and running systems that thousands of unpaid volunteers can execute reliably. It gives strong exposure to volunteer management, corporate partnerships and large-scale programme operations, and fits people who are comfortable working through others rather than delivering everything directly.