Girish Nair

Founder

Founder of Access Life Assistance Foundation

Girish Nair is the founder of Access Life Assistance Foundation (2014)[1], an Indian non-profit working on palliative & cancer care, orphans & child care and healthcare from Mumbai.

Girish Nair is an Indian finance professional who is the founder and chairman of the Access Life Assistance Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation registered as a Section 8 company that provides free accommodation and support to underprivileged children undergoing cancer treatment and to the families who accompany them.

He set up the organisation in 2014 with Ankeet Dave, opening the first Access Life Centre for Childhood Cancer Care at Chembur in Mumbai in June that year. The organisation has since grown to fourteen centres in Mumbai, Pune, Manipal, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Madurai, Silchar and Noida.

Career

Nair has more than fifteen years' experience in finance management and has worked in aviation, public relations and travel, including with Ethiopian Airlines, Malaysian Airlines, the public relations firm Neucom Consulting, SGS Enterprises and Nexus Travel Solutions.

He met Ankeet Dave in 2012 through project work and the two found a shared interest in volunteering. After visiting a paediatric cancer hospital in Mumbai and seeing that families who had travelled from other parts of India had nowhere to stay during the months of treatment, they decided to provide housing. Nair sold one of his residential properties to help start the organisation.

Access Life provides cost-free accommodation together with nutrition, transport to hospitals, counselling, non-formal education and recreational programmes. Families typically stay for the five to twelve months, and sometimes up to two years, that treatment requires. The organisation reports supporting 228 families at a time across its centres.

Recognition

Nair was awarded the Asia Pacific Cancer Society's training grant (APCASOT) for a training programme in Australia in 2016.[2][3][4][5]

Access Life Assistance Foundation

Access Life is a Section 8 non-profit founded in 2014 in Chembur, Mumbai, that gives underprivileged children undergoing cancer treatment and their families free accommodation, nutrition, hospital transport, counselling and non-formal education. Families from remote towns often spend 5-24 months in the city for treatment; Access Life's centres spare them footpaths and abandoned treatment, replicating its home-like model across Mumbai, Pune, Manipal, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Madurai, Silchar and Noida.

Access Life Assistance Foundation reports the following, on its own site: