Mansi Shah

Founder

Mansi Shah is the founder of Happy Feet Home (2014)[1], an Indian non-profit working on palliative & cancer care, women & children and healthcare from Mumbai.

Mansi Shah is the founder and chief executive of Happy Feet Home, a paediatric palliative care centre in Mumbai for children living with life-limiting and life-threatening illnesses. The centre works with children affected by conditions including HIV, cancer and thalassaemia, most of them from poor households, and provides counselling, therapy, medical and financial help and vocational courses.

Shah argues that palliative care in India is too narrowly understood as pain management at the end of life, and that it should begin at diagnosis and extend to the family and carers as well as the patient.

Early life and education

Shah took a bachelor's degree in history and subsequently completed certificate courses before entering the non-profit sector.

Career

Shah began her career at the Akanksha Foundation, where she worked for eight years teaching children in Mumbai and where, she has said, she learned to handle hostility and threats in the communities she worked in. She then worked at Tata Memorial Hospital and afterwards at a centre caring for children with cancer whose prognosis was good, where her role was to improve the children's morale and mental state, using devices such as recreating a cinema visit inside the centre.

She went on to co-found Happy Feet Home, a day centre rather than a residential hospice, which by 2018 was working with around three hundred children in total and about seventy regularly. Its programme includes counselling, therapy, medical and financial support, vocational training and activities such as weekly visits from a therapy dog, and it deliberately extends support to guardians and carers.[2][3][4]

Happy Feet Home

Founded in August 2014, Happy Feet Home is a paediatric palliative care centre in Chembur, Mumbai, offering emotional, psycho-social, educational, vocational and nutritional support free of cost. It works closely with Lokmanya Tilak General Hospital in Sion to run day-care services for children under palliative care, alongside hospital outreach with art-based practitioners and volunteers, community outreach through home visits, and tele-consultation for families.

Happy Feet Home reports the following, on its own site: