Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli, the former captain of the India cricket team, established the Virat Kohli Foundation in 2013 to support underprivileged children. Rather than run its own field programmes, the foundation has largely worked by raising money and channelling it to established charities, and by backing young athletes directly.

Its earliest public activity was a charity auction organised with eBay and Save the Children India in 2014. Fundraising has since been built around large set-piece events, most visibly the Celebrity Clasico football matches between Indian cricketers and film actors. In 2016 the foundation partnered the Smile Foundation on schooling for poor children, hosting a fundraising dinner in Mumbai, and separately joined the ABIL Foundation to support residents of old-age homes. In 2017 Kohli hosted a gala dinner in London for the anti-trafficking organisation Justice and Care, held around a Champions Trophy fixture.

The same year the foundation launched the Athlete Development Programme, which provides promising young sportspeople with coaching, training, fitness and nutrition support; the golfers Aadil Bedi, Arjun Bhati and Diksha Dagar, the tennis player Sumit Nagal, the table tennis players Swastika Ghosh and Manush Shah, and the swimmer Shivani Kataria are among those it has backed. A celebrity golf tournament run with the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group in 2019 was set up to fund the programme.

During the COVID-19 pandemic Kohli and his wife, the actor Anushka Sharma, contributed to the PM CARES Fund and the Maharashtra Chief Minister's Relief Fund in 2020. In the second wave of 2021 they launched a public fundraiser on Ketto titled #InThisTogether, opening it with a personal donation of two crore rupees; it went on to raise more than eleven crore. Later that year the foundation worked with the Awaaz Foundation to set up a trauma and rehabilitation centre for stray animals in Mumbai.[1][2]