As I sit waiting in one of Bangalore’s upscale coffee shops, Arundhuti Gupta bustles in. At 25, she is leading change in the field of youth mentoring through her organisation ‘Mentor Together’ – the country’s only structured programme exclusively focusing on mentoring disadvantaged children.

140 kilometers away from Bangalore city, at the Balakiyara Bala Mandira in Mysore, 20 secondary school and college girls are receiving a priceless education for life, one that will help them grow into empowered women. The state home, run by the Department for Women and Child Development, admits young girls between the ages of six to 18, every year. They are some of the region’s most disadvantaged children coming from orphanages, single parent families and in some cases, backgrounds of abuse and neglect.

For them, Arundhuti’s intervention, Mentor Together, is a ray of hope. Each week, a group of dedicated professionals volunteer to mentor the girls, offering guidance in English, Computers, Life Skills as well as career and academic support.

The concept of mentoring holds special significance for Arundhuti who believes that nothing else can mould a young person’s thinking and facilitate a person’s growth into a self-assured adult, much like Arundhuti herself.

Arundhuti was born in Arunachal Pradesh where her father, a Central Government doctor was posted. The family moved to Bangalore in the late ‘80s and as Arundhuti put it, “We have been really fortunate to have stayed put here throughout my education.” 

A school topper, she says,  “I remember my mother, a high school English teacher was always telling me not to study so much, because I constantly tended to be buried in books.” In spite of being neck deep in training children for the ICSE examinations for almost two decades, Arundhuti’s mother was always 'chilled-out' about her academics. Overall development though, was ingrained early on. And offbeat choices were encouraged.

“Being part of an incredible network of family and friends, I have always had someone to reach out to, to ensure that I grew up right. It’s something that millions of disadvantaged children across the world don’t have,” she realises. And this stark fact is what drives the existence of Mentor Together: the need of being there for somebody who is essentially alone.

When Arundhuti was 19, she presented a paper at a national conference in Bangalore on developing global competencies in education. It was there that she met Rajeev Gowda, Chairperson of the Centre of Public Policy, IIM-B (today, co-trustee of Mentor Together). That was the beginning of an incredible mentor-mentee relationship.

“Our interactions made me reflect on what mentoring really was,” she says, continuing: “I learned that it is a process of facilitation, relational at its heart, where young people are led to realise their potential with the support of adult figures.”

“Mentor Together was still not born then, though” she says. While still in college, she was invited by Rajeev Gowda to be a founding team member of the Resurgent India Trust. The experience saw her mooting the idea of inclusive communities where people had access to relationships that fostered growth.

Soon, she graduated from Mount Carmel College, sweeping the Bangalore University convocation ceremony with awards for academic excellence. After a year-long corporate stint, she completed a finance programme at the Manchester Business School as a Commonwealth Scholar. The germ of the idea that was later to become Mentor Together was growing steadily though.

“I always knew I was coming back after Business School,” she says, “And by then enough amount of work had gone into the idea. So if I was going to get on the ground, a structured, well planned programme was the best way forward.” And so Mentor Together began with a pilot project with the Parikrma Humanity Foundation school in Bangalore. The four month project was not long enough though. “We needed to do something for a longer period and in a community setting; that way we would have a much more expansive view of the mentee’s life enabling us be a more meaningful part of it.”

And that is how Mentor Together moved to the Balakiyara Bala Mandira in Mysore. In its first year, the Mysore chapter had close to 25 women work intensively, fulfilling both ‘primary mentor’ as well as ‘facilitator’ roles in workshops and trainings, with a group of 20 girls. The girls came from vulnerable backgrounds, had experienced a loss of family and community networks at young ages. Their lack of self-belief was instantly evident to the Mentor Together team, pointing to the complete absence of empowering personal networks in their lives. Until now that is. “Over the past year, the girls have grown tremendously,” Arundhuti says, “Making that my biggest learning as a program leader. Every single relationship between mentor and mentee changes and grows from week to week.” Having a mentor in their corner has helped the girls stave off early marriage pressures, focusing instead on career goals, something which would not have happened without the painstaking efforts of the mentors.

“The mentors themselves are put through a rigorous selection process” explains Arundhuti. For the Mysore chapter, 10 mentors were first chosen from 40 applicants after passing several rounds of screening interviews. They bring not only their professional expertise with them but rich and varied life experiences as well. They are put through an induction, several workshops, in order to ensure that they build genuine, empathetic relationships with the mentees they work with.

“So it’s not just about making a great match and then stopping there. Our job is to curate the relationship that is built from this match. Mentor Together is about building rapport, delving into the mentee’s psyche, understanding and supporting her choices.”

Watching the girls grow is beautiful to everyone who is witnessing the change. Arundhuti remembers starting out with apprehension, sometimes underestimating the girls’ ability to understand. But that changed swiftly. “These are some of the most positive, resilient people I have ever met,” she says, “Given what they’ve been through, they never complain.”

It is pertinent to ask at this point how far Mentor Together will go in holding the hands of these girls. Arundhuti is fully aware that a singular relationship will not sustain or suffice in the long run. “What we are looking at building now are robust networks for the girls. A diverse network of people who have their best interests at heart and whom the girls can access, when in need.”

These networks could help the girls land jobs tomorrow, provide them with valuable personal support and even a social network. Access to the right networks has always been crucial for Arundhuti. At 19, she attended the Goldman Sachs Global Leadership Institute in New York City as a Goldman Sachs Global Leader. “I was just really lucky,” she says. But one look at the profile of this young lady reveals a slew of prestigious awards.

While studying in Manchester in 2009, she was invited to the Salzburg Trilogue, a forum supporting inter cultural dialogue both within and beyond Europe by the Austrian Ministry for European and International Affairs and the Bertelsmann Stiftung. This was followed by the Starting Bloc Fellowship a year later in the USA.

Earlier this year in January she participated in the World Justice Forum in Malaysia. “It was professionally rewarding,” she says about the experience. Six months later, she was invited to the 500-member conference held in Barcelona.

This October, she joined a group of 20 fellows as a YouthActionNet Global Fellow 2011 in Mexico (picked from 600 entries across the world). The fellowship, launched by the International Youth Foundation a decade ago selects 20 exceptional social entrepreneurs from across the world and builds them as next generation change leaders. Participation in fellowships and forums has been a reinforcement of sorts for Arundhuti Gupta. “Work can get solitary,” she says, “So affiliating with like minded networks from time to time becomes essential.”

It also opened up the world of art and culture to her. “The biggest side-benefit of getting to see a bit of the world through conferences was visiting so many incredible museums,” says this Modern Art lover and Picasso fan. She even reveals that she has a tattoo of her favourite Picasso painting! After further revealing that catching up on lost sleep is her ‘top’ hobby, she gently steers back the conversation to Mentor Together.

Mentor Together has indeed been moving on to the next level. With a $10,000 grant from IBM and a pro bono consultancy deal with Infosys (four consultants spend up to 16 hours a week fine tuning the programme) Arundhuti is now working on the Bangalore Chapter.

“It will have a stronger mentor focus – we will approach the relationship by focusing on identifying and developing the mentor’s capability first.” On the Mentor Together website, around 250 people have expressed interest in being mentors so far. The coming months are critical in how the Bangalore chapter shapes up.

For now, Arundhuti is busy documenting her work at the Centre of Public Policy at IIM-B where she is supported by a grant from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. The self confessed research junkie stresses the need to document field work and back it up with solid academic research and evidence.

She invites me to watch a part of the documented footage from her programme. A young, smiling Ashwini from the home, is speaking confidently into the camera. She talks about things like dreams and goals, actions and consequences. Her co-mentee Anusha then comes on screen gushing about the moment she first held a camera.

Arundhuti may speak endlessly about the ‘results evaluation’ aspect of her programme but to watch these girls speak confidently on several life matters is the biggest validation of her work. So when the once reticent Pooja beams on camera saying, “I love to Mentor Together!” you know for sure that someone’s life is transformed.

And it’s simply because Mentor Together believes that “A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.”

To enrol in Mentor Together’s mentor program log on to http://www.mentortogether.org/