MUMBAI (India) – Can the non-profit space showcase the same vision, professionalism, scale and accountability as commercial ventures?

India’s Hi5 Youth Foundation is answering this question with a resounding “yes”.

The brainchild of a Mumbaikar couple - R Sundar and Usha Sundar - Hi5 Youth Foundation was founded in 2015, with the aim to provide elite basketball coaching to the underprivileged and unserved sections of India’s youth.

Inspired by their own son’s love for basketball while growing up in the US, the Sundars felt the burning desire to similarly enable access to the sport, in their home country.

Sports is education

“We wanted to bring education to the kids actually. But there are enough NGOs doing education, so we decided to do it through sports,” Mr Sundar says, echoing Nelson Mandela’s famous words that sport “speaks to youth in a language they understand”.

A seasoned entrepreneur, having successfully set up one of India’s early global tech solution companies, Mr Sundar minutely understands how to “start an idea and scale it”.

Hi5 conceptualized a unique model offering highly trained basketball coaches to poorly funded state-run schools. It got its initial breakthrough when Mumbai’s Municipality Board - the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation - tasked it with running the basketball programs at its schools.

4000 children, Eight States

After starting with twelve schools, thanks to having devised and perfected a standard method and curriculum, Hi5 was able to quickly expand its Basketball For Good grassroots program to other States.

The organization impacts 4000 children across eight States in India. “That means…4000 children are currently training…in the program…every day,” the Sundars clarify in unison. It’s the kind of couple chemistry that has been on display ever since the duo, along with their third co-founder P Ramaswamy, launched their first center eight years ago.

Their goal now is to train 10000 children daily, while prioritizing their focus on tribal boarding schools, to ensure that the neediest benefit the most.

Building basketball courts

Besides providing high-quality coaching, where needed, Hi5 also constructs basketball courts — so much so that nineteen have already been built, with three more underway.

Thanks to its professionally run setup that boasts eighty employees and two offices, this entirely self-funded Basketball For Good non-profit has also been able to attract credible partners to help fashion some of these facilities. Most recently, in December 2023, in association with 2K Foundations (the community impact initiative of the popular NBA 2K gaming platform), Hi5 inaugurated a swanky and stylishly muraled court at a government school in Mumbai.

“This is how a program internationally should work. We’ve done programs in every continent. I can fairly, confidently say that this was probably the best managed,” Ronnie Singh, Head of Lifestyle and Content Marketing, 2K, had said while unveiling the court.

Next up for Hi5 is a dream project called ‘Heart Beat’ — an elite residential academy that will commence operations in 2025 - where Hi5’s students from across its different nationwide centers can converge for centralized training and competitions.

Symphony of the Heart and Mind

So how is a couple — who are now in their sixties — able to manage all this?

“We are running this as an intense program, and not as a casual hobby,” Mr Sundar says. “This is the largest basketball excellence program in India at the grassroots, for which we are not charging a single paisa.”

While emphasizing the countless hours of daily work that goes into designing Hi5’s durable and scalable systems, the Sundars are quick to credit their partners in every State, besides their own team on the ground, that allows them to keep shuffling back and forth between India and the US.

Pointing out how the infectious smiles and laughter of the Hi5 children energize them, Mrs Sundar sums up her and her husband’s approach simply thus:

This journey is my heart. The heart says do it. For him, it’s the mind which tells ‘do it.

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The FIBA Foundation is the social and legacy arm of FIBA that addresses the role of sports and particularly basketball in society, preserving and promoting basketball’s values and its cultural heritage.

The FIBA Foundation believes that basketball has the power to empower, educate and inspire youth and facilitates this by implementing Basketball For Good projects around the world.

FIBA