It began with twenty cream buns from a local bakery.
A young man, working night shifts at a call centre to fund his own college education by day, would gather a few friends, pool together whatever pocket money they had saved, and walk out to where Hyderabad’s homeless slept. They would hand out the buns, sit down, and talk. It was small, informal, and entirely unplanned.
But somewhere between those conversations and those cream buns, Arun Daniel Yellamaty Kumar, founder of Youngistaan Foundation and Purpose Project, began asking himself a question he has never stopped asking: what more can I do? What started as an unregistered group of friends distributing food to homeless people on the streets of Hyderabad has since grown into a structured organisation working across education, gender interventions, menstrual health, disaster relief, cyber safety, responsible AI literacy, and rehabilitation, driven by over 70,000 volunteers spread across multiple cities in India.
A Life Shaped by Necessity and Curiosity
Arun’s path was never straightforward. He worked through his nights at a call centre so he could attend college during the day, becoming, as he recalls, one of the very few in his class to stay committed to a single career path after graduating. He briefly considered film production, drawn by the belief that a moving picture could make a far larger impact than words alone, but the costs were out of reach. Journalism found him next, and despite a rough start, he took to it quickly. “I still remember getting into office at 10 o’clock and I would get out of office at one o’clock,” he says. “I loved every bit of the things I would do.”
It was during those years in journalism that the seeds of something larger were quietly taking root.
The Accidental Organisation
The NGO, Arun is clear, was never part of a plan. “It was never my intention of starting an NGO,” he says. The impulse was simpler: a childhood and young adulthood shaped by the idea of giving back, whether at home, in church, or in college. The cream buns gave way to clothes, to informal counselling, to helping homeless individuals return to their home towns. The group started giving haircuts, because, as Arun explains, the goal was to make people feel valued. “Trying to get that belonging to them,” is how he puts it.
Then a volunteer filmed one of their food distribution sessions and put it online. The video went viral. Suddenly, what had been a small, quiet act of care in Hyderabad had sparked interest in six more cities: Bangalore, Chennai, Bhopal, Delhi, Mumbai, and Durgapur. “I was just learning as I moved,” Arun says, “because there was nothing like an NGO sector or a development sector that was a very high career pathway for people.” The group formalised into a registered organisation, Youngistaan Foundation, which he continues to run today, alongside Purpose Project, a parallel initiative through which he delivers leadership training and mental health and well-being workshops, and from which he draws his primary income.
Building From the Ground Up
While speaking to The Logical Indian, Arun reflected on what the early years of Youngistaan Foundation actually looked like. The challenges were both practical and social. People did not always understand what he was doing. Many assumed he was wasting his time. On the ground, the homeless communities they were trying to serve did not immediately welcome them either. “The more we continue to help them, they felt like these are people who genuinely care for us,” he says, “and then they started opening up.”
When it came to money, Arun held to one principle above all others: let the work do the talking. “Let me work as hard as possible to make an impact, change lives, do what little best we can do.” Donations and support came in gradually, drawn by the visible sincerity of the effort. It was slow, but it held.
From Food to a Full Ecosystem of Intervention
What began as feeding and rehabilitating homeless people expanded, need by need, into a much wider web of work. Education programs followed, reaching urban slums, orphanages, and government schools. Gender and child safety interventions came next, opening up conversations on women’s safety, adolescent health, and menstrual hygiene in communities where these subjects had long been treated as taboo. Disaster relief, cyber safety, road safety, and animal care were added over time, not through grand strategy, but through the simple logic Arun has always followed: “Wherever there’s a need, how can you ignore this? You cannot say I don’t want to help.”
Every program, despite the breadth of themes, is structured around long-term, deep intervention. “All of them are structured as a deeper intervention and all of them are long term as well,” he says.
The Volunteer Question
Growing a volunteer base to 70,000 people is one thing. Keeping them is another. In conversation with The Logical Indian, Arun acknowledged that volunteer drop-off is a real phenomenon, but described a system built deliberately to counter it. Before anyone is placed in the field, they go through orientation, multiple rounds of training, and a clearly defined set of expectations. “We are very structured,” he says. “We tell people, see, we are here to just make an impact.”
The space is not framed as purely recreational. Volunteers are expected to show up every weekend and commit three hours to their assigned program, whether education, food distribution, or gender and health work. “They in fact are more behind me saying why this is not happening,” Arun says of his long-standing volunteers, some of whom have been with the organisation for eight or nine years, and several of whom have moved from volunteering to working with Youngistaan Foundation full-time. For those who cannot manage structured, recurring commitments, one-time opportunities are kept available. “Those two opportunities we really provided,” he says.
Behaviour Change Takes Time
Across all these programs, one challenge sits at the centre: behaviour change is slow. Infrastructure can be built quickly. Mindsets cannot. Arun speaks about this with the patience of someone who has spent years learning it firsthand.
“Removing the shame around menstruation takes years,” he says. “Even now, there are so many people struggling with period taboos.” The same applies to education, gender roles, and community safety. What works, he has found, is consistency, trust, and community ownership.
He points to one urban slum where Youngistaan Foundation has worked for six years. They first arrived with a small distribution of school bags. The start was uncertain, even contentious. But they kept returning, sitting with parents, community leaders, and children, building relationships slowly.
Today, that same slum hosts a resource centre housed in a space the community itself provided. It is staffed by a community member trained through the organisation. English classes, computer training, life skills sessions, after-school education, and skill development programs run there daily. First-generation degree holders have emerged from that community. Girls who might have dropped out or faced early marriage have continued their education. People from the community are now reporting crimes.
“It takes time,” Arun says simply. “And people who are working in the sector, they need to understand that.”
New Fronts: AI, Substances, and Juvenile Rehabilitation
As the Youngistaan Foundation has grown, so have the areas it has entered. One of the newer programs focuses on Responsible AI, built around a recognition that AI is increasingly present in young people’s lives, often without adequate understanding of either its uses or its risks. In government schools, colleges, and urban slums, Arun says, knowledge of AI is thin, while misuse is growing. The program works to bridge that gap, helping young people understand how to use AI responsibly and how to protect themselves from related cybercrimes.
Two more recent interventions are not yet on the organisation’s website. One addresses substance use among young people, particularly boys, in urban slums and government colleges. “There are so many boys dropping out of education because of how they are so massively addicted to various substances,” Arun says. The second works inside juvenile homes, running counselling, skill-building, and rehabilitation programs for convicted and under-trial youth. The concern is straightforward: without intervention, these young people cycle into petty crime and, eventually, into the adult prison system.
The Road Ahead: Scale and Depth
Looking ahead, Arun describes two priorities that will define the next phase of Youngistaan Foundation. The first is deepening existing work. “Hunger and homelessness will affect education. Education will affect dignity. And it will again come back to gender effect.” The interdependence of these issues is, for him, the reason that superficial interventions are never enough.
The second priority is scale. With a decade of learning behind them, the organisation is now working to expand its urban slum interventions into more communities, take its education and menstrual health programs to more locations, and extend its reach into more cities. On the community safety front, Youngistaan Foundation is working with the police department on a Safe Village Initiative, being rolled out across 126 villages in Telangana through the Bal Panchayat program.
On menstrual health, the work is moving beyond awareness. Menstrual hygiene incinerators are being set up to support end-to-end waste management in communities the organisation already serves, and girls’ toilets in schools are being renovated and newly set up, addressing the infrastructure gaps that directly contribute to girls dropping out of education.
“One of the things that I really believe is you cannot do things alone,” Arun says. “You need partners. You need like-minded people.” The search for those people, and for the resources to sustain the work, continues.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
What stands out most in Arun Daniel Yellamaty Kumar’s story is not the scale Youngistaan Foundation has reached, but the consistency of the thinking behind it. From the beginning, the work has moved from one need to the next without losing its thread. Feeding homeless people led to questions about rehabilitation. Rehabilitation raised questions about education. Education surfaced questions about gender. Gender pointed back to health. And health looped back around to the conditions that make hunger and homelessness inevitable in the first place. As Arun himself puts it, “Hunger and homelessness will affect education.
Education will affect dignity. And it will again come back to gender effect.” In a sector where organisations often work in silos, that kind of joined-up thinking, built not from theory but from years of listening and responding on the ground, is worth noting. The young people coming through Youngistaan Foundation, whether as volunteers, beneficiaries, or community members now running their own resource centres, are perhaps the clearest evidence of what it produces.
The work is ongoing, the needs are vast, and the organisation is still looking for partners. But the foundation, laid quietly with cream buns in Hyderabad, has proven more durable than anyone might have expected.
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