wheels

WHEELS started as the “Giving Back”/Philanthropy initiative of PanIIT to drive country-scale transformation (especially of rural India) commensurate with the power & brand of global IIT alumni & ecosystem.

Individual IITs have created their respective foundations to help fund on-campus activities and capital improvements. However, most alumni (save few with large enough wealth to create their own non-profit foundations) who wish to ‘give back’ to their additional causes & communities of interest find it difficult. From searching for matching (to their cause & location) non-profits to assessing their credibility to monitoring their performance become all too overwhelming, resulting in the intent often stopping short of action. WGF was created to remove that barrier and provide an easy ‘giving’ platform, and along the way also collaborate with their fraternity of fellow IITians and institutes.

WHEELS Global Foundation (WGF) was formally incorporated as a 501C(3) organization in the United States, at the behest of late President Abdul Kalam, as a simple enabling platform for the 400,000+ alumni to ‘give back’ to not only their country by birth but also to their country ‘by adoption’. WGF strives to offer technology-enabled solutions to the six major challenges faced by people all over the world: clean potable drinking Water, scale Healthcare delivery, renewable energy, access to Education, rural Livelihood, and Sustainability. As alumni of the IIT system, we adopted the tag line: Applying Technology to Scale impact of Philanthropy. Our goal is to work collaboratively with other NGOs with feet-on-the-ground to become their technology partners and to help them scale their promising solutions with huge growth & impact runway. Where new solutions must be developed, we will work with the IITs to sponsor research and development.

From its origins of IIT ecosystem roots, WGF has further grown by welcoming participation from professionals and experts with shared passion and expertise relevant to its mission & priorities (e.g., professionals from medical, legal, and public services).