Feel Distressed? Connect to philanthropists through Shout for Help platform

By:Reshma Jain 

With a vision to seek a world of hope and social justice, where poverty has been overcome and all people live with honour and dignity, LK Foundation Trust based in Hyderabad works through a platform called ‘Shout for Help’ (SFH) to save lives, defeat poverty, achieve social justice and help the distressed.

But what led to launch such a platform? Abhiram Kandoor, Founder-President of LK Foundation Trust shares the story. People in distress do not often reach out for help. They choose to hide their problems and pain. They do this out of confusion, embarrassment, fear of losing self-respect or even fear of exploitation.

Everything cannot be solved by money alone. Access to expert advice- which is unbiased and available on time, can be a saviour for the distressed, helping to face and solve the problem. Without this timely and trust-worthy help, the distressed are pushed into a corner which might lead them to take extreme steps.

So who do they turn to for help? Charities and NGOs are doing a great job by providing food, shelter, education and other aid to the needy, but distressed individuals struggling with their problems are not considered as part of charity or philanthropic action. By falling between the cracks of the system, needs of distressed individuals are often ignored.

How can the distressed get the help they need? How do the distressed know who to call and whether they can be trusted? Can the distressed confidently shout for help, knowing they will be heard?

 It was found that when the ‘help seeker’ wanted help when he/she is in distress, they wouldn’t know how to contact the right philanthropist for seeking their advice or help. Likewise, philanthropists who are always willing to help the needy could not reach out to them on time.

ShoutForHelp (www.shoutforhelp.org) is a technology driven platform that has been conceived by Abhiram Kandoor to connect distressed help-seekers with subject-matter experts who are giving back to society by offering their expertise in a philanthropic spirit- for free. Anyone having any issues in the categories listed in the website can register as a help seeker and secure timely help from their registered philanthropist experts in various domains such as financial, legal, healthcare and education and get their related issues resolved.

 “To bridge the gap, we came up with an idea of by creating a philanthropic platform called Shout For Help, where in by connecting both philanthropists and help seeker, we can serve the needy in a transparent, democratic and timely way to save the lives of the people,” said Abhiram Kandoor, who is an highly experienced senior finance professional having extensive industry expertise.

Abhiram, added, “We wish to bring philanthropic experts such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers, social service providers, NGOs, etc. and the help seekers onto one platform to help resolve various issues, thereby creating a happy and peaceful society.”

“As a first step before we launch this portal to the help seekers, we are reaching out to philanthropists to register themselves as ‘experts’ in any or all the four categories to extend their help in chosen areas of expertise. Experts for now are in four categories – healthcare, financial, legal and education. We intend to launch the portal to the public at large (help seekers) soon as we get a critical number of experts onboard,” stated Abhiram.

The main objective of this platform is to ‘Give Back to Society’. “We are going to inspire every citizen to start helping the distressed through our platform - which will be maintaining confidentiality of distressed help seeker, transparency by means of connecting experts directly with help seekers, convenience by means of online platform by which anyone can use and it can reach every corner of the country,” said Abhiram.

Subsequent to the launch of the SFH platform to the distressed help seekers, SFH plans to launch a mobile app in the next 4-9 months. To make the platform convenient to the help seekers, SFH is planning to build the voice-to-text conversion chats by help seekers with the experts and then introduce voice calls for making issue resolution simple and easy.