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February - 2002 - issue > Cover Feature
Social Entrepreneur
Friday, February 1, 2002
At five a.m. on September 29, Vasona County Park in Los Gatos, California is a curious sight. Halogen lights fuelled by portable generators illuminate the lush, green meadow in the early hours of the morning. Hundreds of CRY (Child Relief & You) volunteers scuttle around the park preparing for the Annual CRY Walk. Registration tables and information booths are set up; sponsor banners are erected; water stations are assembled at three spots along the 10-km trail; and trees, canopies and tables are decorated with red, white and blue ribbons. The aim is to inspire a festive mood in people out to enjoy an end-of-summer day. By 8:00 a.m, everything is ready.

This is a big day for all, but especially for Hari Krishnan. The Walk is his baby. Since 1998, when the first CRY Walk was held in Atlanta, Krishnan has been intimately involved with it. In 1999, the first year of the Walk in the Bay Area, there were about 450 walkers. By 2001, it shot up to 800.

Krishnan is a design engineer with nVidia, one of the top makers of graphics chips and boards for gaming and industrial design applications. The company makes chips for the new rage in the gaming console world — Microsoft’s Xbox. While working with nVidia is very exciting, he admits that working with CRY provides a deeper sense of fulfillment.

“The kind of satisfaction I get from working for CRY is something that I wouldn’t trade for anything else,” he says. “Work is work — that’s my career and it will always be there.”

Krishnan is one of a few unusual young Silicon Valley professionals actively involved in volunteer efforts — someone who, despite a demanding work schedule, still finds the time and motivation to make a difference in society. In the case of CRY, the beneficiaries are unprivileged children in both rural and urban India. The efforts of volunteers in America seem to be growing every year. CRY Inc., the American branch of the Indian organization, contributed nearly 30 percent of CRY’s 2001 disbursals to projects.

Many of the organization’s U.S. volunteers were already familiar with CRY while they were in India. When they came to the U.S., these young, single men and women looked for ways to meet other Indians with similar backgrounds and occupy their time in fruitful endeavors. An obvious choice was CRY. The organization has 1,400 volunteers in the U.S., with Atlanta and the Bay Area boasting the biggest numbers. Gradually, their volunteering worlds and social lives have begun to blend together, as CRY members meet at each other’s homes to discuss activities and find ways to garner support for their organization.

It is eye opening that in Silicon Valley, a place known for its almost inhuman commitment to business success and material wealth, Indian engineers spend so much time working to alleviate poverty-related problems in India. The “brain-drain” of India’s brightest engineers leaving the country for America or elsewhere has been a source of concern for people seeking to design a more prosperous future for India. Krishnan and others like him are using their talents and drive to have a positive impact, half way around the world. In this sense it is impossible to say that they have abandoned the country of their birth.

When Krishnan moved to the Bay Area in 1997, he heard that a group of people was trying to raise funds for CRY India through the Million Penny Drive. He immediately got involved.

“The emotional attraction to CRY was its philosophy,” he says. “The founding principles are, ‘Every individual can make a difference and what we can do, we must do.’”

CRY’s strict financial discipline also attracted Krishnan. He says that when people contribute money to a volunteer organization, they are often plagued by doubts about whether their money is being used properly. CRY, he says, has a very meticulous financial monitoring process, and members select projects very diligently.

Krishnan describes running projects for CRY as similar to running a start-up. “It’s not entrepreneurship in the traditional sense; it’s social entrepreneurship,” he says. “There was no organization called CRY in the Bay Area five years back. We started with nothing, and today we are an organization that raises $250,000 a year for children.”
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