Matthew Spacie

Matthew Spacie is a British businessman based in India and the founder of the Magic Bus India Foundation, which uses sport and mentoring to keep children from poor households in education and move them into work.

He first came to India in 1986, aged nineteen, and volunteered with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. He returned in 1996 as chief operating officer of the travel group Cox and Kings, and played rugby for the Indian national side. While practising at the Bombay Gymkhana he noticed boys from the surrounding streets watching from outside the club, invited them in and began coaching them.

Magic Bus grew out of that group in 1999. Spacie hired a bus every fortnight to take the older boys, acting as mentors, and younger children from local organisations out of the city for a day; the children's name for the vehicle became the organisation's name. He resigned from Cox and Kings in 2001 to run it full time, and worked with the education non-profit Akanksha in its early years. The insight he drew from it was that structured play combined with mentors drawn from the same neighbourhoods was an effective way to change what young people expected of themselves.

The organisation now runs a life-skills programme designed to carry adolescents through secondary school and a livelihoods programme that trains and places young people in work, and it deliberately works with the surrounding ecosystem of parents, peers and local institutions rather than with children alone. It reports around three million young people in its programmes, nearly 500,000 placed in employment, and roughly 4,000 staff across six countries. Spacie also co-founded the online travel company Cleartrip in 2006 and sits on the board of the philanthropy advisory organisation Dasra.

He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, and was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year by Business Standard in 2018.[2][3]