Partners

Trust for Youth and Child Leadership

Dr Siva Mathiyazhagan, Bharathi Basu, and Jugal Kishore co-founded Trust for Youth and Child Leadership (TYCL) during their college years in 2009. TYCL was envisioned as an organization to empower young people and children from marginalized backgrounds through education and leadership trainings. As the children they mentored grew into adolescents, they recognized the ongoing need for support and guidance, especially considering the high number of youth from marginalized communities and those who were first-generation learners. To extend their services beyond their mentees, TYCL launched the Puducherry Youth Helpline. Starting as a grassroots organization driven by volunteers and youth, TYCL has now positively impacted over half a billion people locally. With their office located in a vibrant lane of Pondicherry city, the organization focuses on providing safe, inclusive, and participatory spaces for local youth.

Given Pondicherry's status as a Union Territory with a high suicide rate, TYCL has incorporated a mental health component into its core work. Taking a unique social approach to youth suicide prevention, TYCL offers services such as the Puducherry Youth Helpline and the Mobile Mental Health Clinic. These services aim to address the social determinants of youth suicidality by providing counseling, job assistance, career guidence and other programs related to mental health awareness, self-defense training (beyond physical defense), positive masculinity training for young boys and men, as well as free vocational courses in designing and Photoshop for youth to increase employability.

Work with MHI:

Since April 2023, TYCL and MHI have partnered to provide support for mental health interventions and suicide prevention work in Pondicherry. The project includes the following programs and activities:

Mobile Mental Health Clinic – The First and only Psychological First Aid outreach in the rural communities of Pondicherry done through volunteers.

“Puducherry Youth Helpline (YHL): +91 9655507090”: Personalised tele-counselling through calls and chat feature in the native language (Tamil).

Youth Mental Health Training - Training of Trainers (ToT) and community gatekeepers training programs through a set of sessions that build perspective, knowledge, and capacity to handle fellow youth with mental health challenges.

For more information, please click here.