ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2022
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. Over 31,000 young leaders on 2,400+ campuses across 140+ nations applied to join the Class of 2022. 200+ campuses worldwide (just 8%) were selected to host the 3,000+ Millennium Fellows.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT RAPHAEL TONY, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2022.
Rajagiri School of Engineering & Technology | Kochi, India | Advancing SDG 4 & UNAI 3
" I am a big believer in the saying the more you give, the more you receive. I believe that God has purposely placed some people in specific situations so that they may lend a helping hand to those who need it. And hence uplifting underprivileged people and seeing a visible improvement in their life is something that adds meaning and value to my life.
Even the tiniest act of kindness can create a ripple effect in the lives of those around us. And experience has taught me that kindness shown often comes back in unexpected ways during unexpected times. I hope the Millennium Fellowship will train me to be an empathetic leader and to carry out my project. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: ABHIGYAAN
What’s the life of a child in an orphanage in India like? The child has limited access to resources like food and clothing. He/She has access to education till the age of 14. And then at the age of 18, they are forced to leave their only home to brave the streets.
Tough life? Yes. But what is one thing that can make them headstrong and help them face the challenges of life?
It is developing into a strong personality who has a clear idea of the different aspects of reality and knows how to navigate them. This can only be achieved by being constantly exposed to new ideas and learning about the real world outside.
The main problem that our project tries to address is this: How can we equip the orphans in an orphanage with this sort of knowledge?
We truly believe the best way to tackle this challenge is by giving them access to a wide collection of books. It is the best way for them to escape from their reality and be taken to another person’s story and to live and learn from the characters.
So our project ‘ABHIGYAAN’ (Source of Knowledge in Hindi) aims at collecting books from various schools and distributing them to various orphanages in our district. We plan to host an interschool book drive contest to gamify this process so that the school with the maximum number of books collected will be declared a winner. The collected books will then be transported to various orphanages around our district.
We have divided our project into various milestones. Our initial step is to identify all the orphanages in our district that are deprived of a good collection of books. This might involve going to the orphanages and meeting the authorities. Next, we shall approach one school that is willing to test out our idea. We shall collect the books from the students of the school, transport them, store them, sort them and then distribute them to orphanages based on the need.
Using the experience that we gained from this smaller drive, we plan to go large-scale, namely the interschool contest. But before that, we intend to meet with companies and NGOs that may be interested in sponsoring the campaign and transport costs. Next, we plan to get as many schools as possible in our district to sign up for the contest. The contest will then run for 1 week and a leaderboard will be constantly updated. We also plan to design a scoring sheet that awards points if a minimum number of books in a particular genre is obtained.
About the Millennium Fellow
Raphael Tony is pursuing his Computer Science Bachelors at the Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology, Kerala, India. Being a tech enthusiast, he loves to work on innovative ideas that make a difference in society. He loves reading and believes growth is vital. He has held several leadership positions like Headboy, Secretary of the Computer Society of the IEEE Student Branch, etc.
He believes that every challenge is an opportunity to make us stronger and we have a responsibility to face those challenges boldly. In any endeavor, he always tries to bring out the best qualities in others and encourages them to pursue what they find meaningful.
