Back in 2000, our inspiration, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, caught sight of a group of children fighting with street dogs over scraps of food. This sight greatly agonised him and with this germinated a prolific idea, known today as The Akshaya Patra Foundation.

From this experience was born our vision that “no child in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger”. This pledge translated into action, when in June 2000, Akshaya Patra served its first mid-day-meals to 1,500 children in five Government schools in Bengaluru.

Since then, 15 years have passed and today we are already serving mid-day meals to nearly 15 lakh school children from 10,845 schools across 10 states in India every single day. Our mission is to reach out to 5 million children by 2020 and we are only going to march ahead to make this happen!

The Foundation has witnessed exponential growth in its every sphere in the last 15 years. Strategic partnerships, constant innovation, planned expansions, enhancement and continuous support from our well-wishers have helped us achieve what we are today!

But the challenges looming are enormous and time is short. The struggle that our children face daily to procure food is overwhelming and reiterates how important it is to end classroom hunger once and for all.

As we celebrate our 15 year anniversary on 11 November, 2015 we would like to extend a warm thank you to all our supporters, donors, volunteers, team members and to every single person who has ever been a part of this journey.

Thank you for believing in us, and thank you for helping us make a difference.

We look forward to celebrating many more years of success with you all.

Here at Akshaya Patra, we are excited to announce the launch of our new website www.hopestories.in which goes live from today, 14 October, 2015!

The website offers an opportunity for readers to connect with the lives of our beneficiaries, school teachers, principals, parents, organisation staff and many others who have been influenced by our Mid-Day Meal Programme. Hopestories.in therefore features a wide range of stories and snippets featuring these fascinating people, their aspirations and the impact of the programme.

The site also includes short video testimonials of our beneficiaries who speak about their ambitions, the mid-day meal and how it has impacted them. With this assortment of stories, you will be able to journey through the diverse lives of our beneficiaries and learn more about our Mid-Day Meal Programme.

The Hope Stories website is designed to be user friendly and has an attractive navigational panel for visitors to scroll through the stories and also increase your awareness on the Foundation’s support towards its beneficiaries. You can also support this initiative by contributing stories to our page. We invite you to contact us to set up a visit to our beneficiary schools near you to interact with the children, staff and parents, and send in pictures, videos and snippets capturing their stories.

We hope that you will enjoy visiting our website and immersing yourself in its stories. We welcome your valuable feedback so we can continue to improve.

To visit the website click here: www.hopestories.in