Rajesh Bhat

Co-founder

Rajesh Bhat is the co-founder of Head Held High Foundation [1], an Indian non-profit working on livelihood and education from Bengaluru.

Rajesh Bhat is an Indian social entrepreneur and a co-founder and board member of the Head Held High Foundation, a Bangalore-based non-profit working on poverty alleviation in rural India through soft-skills training, English-language teaching, career guidance and support for rural entrepreneurship.

He founded the organisation in 2007, at the age of 25, with Madan Padaki and Sunil Savara, motivated by the aim of enabling rural young people and children to build the capabilities to lead better lives.

Early life and education

Bhat comes from a village near Sirsi in Karnataka. His parents moved him to a school in Sirsi town, and he went on to Sri Bhuvanendra College at Karkala and then to an engineering degree at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysore.

Career

After graduating Bhat took a campus placement but left within a few months, and then joined OnMobile, at the time a startup of eighty to ninety people, where he worked for two to three years.

While still at OnMobile he began working with Sunil Savara and Madan Padaki on what became the Head Held High Foundation, founded in 2007. In 2008 the group ran a proof-of-concept pilot in which eight non-literate young people from villages in Karnataka were trained.

Head Held High's model treats rural empowerment as a sustainable enterprise rather than charity, training rural youth in practical skills and English so that they can take up work in business process outsourcing, retail, hospitality and other sectors. The organisation also runs Global Action on Poverty and rural entrepreneurship programmes.

Bhat subsequently founded Iron Lady, an organisation providing leadership training for women, and serves as its chief executive.[2][3][4]

Head Held High Foundation

Head Held High Foundation, based in Bengaluru, runs skill-training centres and livelihood programmes for vulnerable rural youth and women across 19 Indian states, aiming to alleviate poverty through employability and self-employment support.

Head Held High Foundation reports the following, on its own site: