Working with disadvantaged children
- Links-India is a registered charity based in London.
- Our work in India focuses on helping disadvantaged children achieve their true potential.
- The children may come from extremely poor families or have severe physical difficulties.
- We raise funds through sponsorships, donations and associate programs.
- 100% of your donation will go to the project you choose. We raise all our administration costs separately.
- Follow the links to discover more about our work and how you can help us
A Little Bit of History
In the spring of 1997, having reached my 40th birthday, I decided to pack up my job and visit India for a year. The plan was to travel, soak up some sun, meet some people and be of some use if I could find work to do.
My first stop was Ladakh where I worked with a charitable organisation focusing on educating the young village children. I stayed in a local family house in the village of Spituk and got to know the people and the monks from the nearby monastery. It was a great time. The sun shone, the mountains were beautiful and the people warm and welcoming.
I took the opportunity to travel and visited many of the temples and monasteries on the west side of Ladakh. During one of these tours I met Geshe Sonam Palzang from Jangchup Chosling Nunnery.
Geshe la asked me to help find sponsors to support the nuns. As the nunnery also functioned as the local care home for orphaned and destitute girls I was very happy to help and agreed to look for sponsors on my return to the UK. The final six months I spent in Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government-in-exile and the home of H.H. the Dalai Lama. I attended classes on Buddhism, taught English and braved the awesome monsoon rains.
Of course as soon as I returned to London I was busy telling people about all this and they, generous souls that they are, started writing out cheques to support this work.
A few months later I returned to India. This time to got involved in a monastic education project. The work was slow, as work tends to be in Ladakh, no telephone, no running water and electricity only in the early morning and early evening but we did make a lot of progress. The school buildings were restored; a greenhouse built a new water supply brought in. We also set up a small business selling postcards and greeting cards and used the income to further the expansion plans.
Around this time I decided to put the work I was doing onto a more formal footing– it’s one thing having your family donating money into your personal account but it’s not right when they’re having a whip round in the office and the cheque was made out to me! So, in 1999, Links was formed. The name came from our desire to bring people together rather than organizing everything ourselves. The founding members were Claire Salisbury (secretary), myself (chair) and my sister, Marianne (treasurer). We agreed to work as a voluntary organisation for three years and, if we still wanted to continue, apply for charitable status.
Three years later we became a charity (now known as Links-India) and a company limited by guarantee.
Since that time our work has expanded but our focus has remained in the areas of education and health and, in particular, giving disadvantaged children a chance in life.