The community service girl
While her peers have been studying, Natascha Yogachandra has spent a decade running non-profits across the globe. She tells Katie Jacobs her remarkable story.
I’m pretty much normal,” says Natascha Yogachandra. And, when she describes her hobbies – hanging out with friends, reading and teaching herself to play guitar – it’s hard not to see the 16-year-old as a typical IB Diploma Programme student.
Scratch a little deeper, however, and it soon becomes clear that any claim to normality is merely modesty. Natascha, who studies at Ruamrudee International School in Bangkok, Thailand, has a burgeoning second life as a charity coordinator, fundraiser and cheerleader for the poor and repressed that has taken her family across the globe and seen her raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for good causes. Even in a school where service has become central to the curriculum, her story is so awe-inspiring it has spawned a book
and brought her international recognition.
Natascha’s non-profit quest began at the age of seven in New York, USA, where she organized her first book drive for underprivileged children (her Project Book Angels charity is still helping young people read today. “I can’t imagine a world devoid of reading,” she says.)
Right from the start, her parents backed her endeavours. “They raised me with the belief that it’s our duty to serve humankind,” she says. “It’s not an extra-curricular activity. It should be part of our daily lives.”
At 11, images of displaced families in the aftermath of the 2004 South East Asian tsunami permanently changed the course of her life. “When it hit, I couldn’t sit at home doing nothing, or send money not being sure where it was going,” she says. She asked her parents to take her to the source of the suffering and together they formed the Hope Is Life Foundation, raising US$20,000 to spend a month in the region, visiting villages and ensuring supplies reached those most in need.
Returning home, Natascha knew that she had changed irreversibly: “I was in the mall, seeing people being so materialistic, and I thought, ‘I can’t go back to the same life I used to live.’” She packed her life into two suitcases, and the family set off for India and devoted themselves to regional aid work in every spare moment.
Today, in Bangkok, Natascha spends her weekdays studying for the IB Diploma Programme and her weekends travelling to nearby countries – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – visiting Hope Is Life projects. The foundation provides education for poverty-hit children, building learning centres, providing books or sponsoring further education, and has recently started working with women who have been sold or tricked into sex slavery.
The projects’ scale is made all the more remarkable by the fact that the foundation consists of just Natascha and her parents. “We do everything,” she says. “We raise the money, we visit the places and we don’t just dump the items and leave. We establish a relationship with the people. Trust is so important.
“Fitting it all in is tough, that’s for sure. But doing the Diploma Programme has taught me time management, and challenging myself has shown me what I’m capable of. I chose the IB because it encourages all the values I value, and makes you a well-rounded person, which is what I’m trying to be.”
She admits that it hasn’t always been easy. Although her privileged upbringing allowed her
to travel extensively, it also made moving from her comfortable western lifestyle to India particularly hard. “The culture shock was huge,” she says. “I lived in a lovely house with everything I wanted. Suddenly I was living in a leaky room with mice and monkeys on the roof. I missed my friends and wished I could go back home. It was definitely worth it though.”
Spending a lot of time in areas of extreme poverty and suffering takes its toll on the most experienced aid workers, and for a teenager, albeit one with years of charity work under her belt, it must be very draining. Does she ever get down? “Seeing all this suffering is emotionally exhausting, but it motivates me even more,” she says. “I don’t enjoy seeing these things. But it needs to be done.”
She is moved to carry on in her quest by the testimony of those the foundation helps. They include Vansyna, from Vietnam, who at 13 was convinced by a woman to travel to Cambodia with a friend for a party. The girls were drugged and separated. Vansyna was sold to a brothel owner and spent a year in a building full of child prostitutes, being sold by the hour. She still doesn’t know the fate of her friend, but with the foundation’s help is beginning to rebuild her life. “The trafficking of women isn’t a pretty thing to talk about,” says Natascha. “As a girl, it’s the worst thing I can imagine. But we need to open people’s eyes to the tragedies going on.”
Natascha acknowledges she is lucky to have the money to relocate on a whim, and supportive parents who encourage and share her passion for service. However, she is insistent that “there is need everywhere… If you make that bit of effort to look, you will find it. It could mean getting up early on a Saturday morning to volunteer. It just takes that extra push.” She admits that she still needs that extra push herself: “Sometimes I don’t feel like going”. But service is so much part of her life that it is the norm. “To a stranger I might seem unusual, but to my friends and family, I’m not. This is who I am now.”
Natascha hopes to return to the USA, studying communications and international relations, and is considering photojournalism as a career: “There are stories everywhere that need to be told.” She will never stop her charity work, but intends to keep the foundation small: “We’re based on family values, and I want it to remain that way. If I change one child’s
life, that’s enough.”
While her friends tease her about her efforts (“they call me the community service girl”),
one of Natascha’s biggest goals is to inspire other young people. “I’m still a normal teenager and I want to show that anyone can do this if they put their mind to it,” she says. “Our generation is going to move the world.”
CV: Natascha Yogachandra
1993 Born in Hong Kong. Grows up in Fairport, New York, USA
1999 Starts Project Book Angels, sending used books to needy children around the world
2005 Travels with her parents to Asia and spends a month helping victims of the tsunami. Co-founds the Hope is Life Foundation. Moves to India with her parents to continue the foundation’s work
2007 Arrives in Bangkok to focus charity efforts
on helping people in South East Asia
2009 Spirit of Service, a book about Natascha’s charity work and
a guide to other
young volunteers,
is published
2010 Travels to Haiti to help with the relief effort, with plans of building a school
