There is a version of service learning that most Indian school students know well.
A platform representative comes to your school. They present to your entire grade in an auditorium. They show you a pre-selected NGO, a template campaign page, and a fundraising target. They tell you it will look good on your college application. You share a link with your parents' contacts, hit the number, collect the credit, and move on.
You probably cannot tell anyone, six months later, what the money actually did.
This is what service learning has become for a generation of young people across India. Not an opportunity to discover what they care about. Not a chance to build something real. A requirement to fulfill, designed and packaged by a for-profit company whose primary interest is in the cut it takes from every rupee donated.
How the model works — and who it works for
Platforms like FuelADream have built their business by going directly to schools, embedding themselves in service learning requirements, and running this playbook at scale. Their model depends on volume. The more students they push through the system, the more fees they collect.
According to their own published campaign owner agreement, they charge 9% of total funds raised plus 3% in payment processing fees, plus applicable taxes. On every campaign a student runs, a meaningful share of what donors gave never reaches the cause.
That is not a design flaw. It is the design.
What gets lost in that model is the thing that actually matters: the student. Not as a fundraising conduit. Not as a CAS credit to be processed. As a young person with a genuine point of view about what is broken in the world and what could be done about it.
Why Udayaa exists
Our founders went through exactly this experience. They sat in those assemblies. They ran those template campaigns. And they came away convinced that the entire model was wrong — not just the fees, but the philosophy underneath it. The idea that young people need to be handed a cause rather than given the space to find one. The idea that service learning is something that happens to students rather than something students build.
Udayaa was created as a direct response to that experience.
We are a Section 8 not-for-profit. We charge students nothing to use the platform. Every rupee donated to a campaign on Udayaa reaches the cause it was given for.
The fees we do collect from the system are reinvested back into the platform — so that we can keep building infrastructure that supports more young changemakers across the country, not into profit margins or shareholder returns.
The bigger difference
The structure is only part of it.
The bigger difference is what we ask of students before they start. We do not hand anyone a template. We ask what actually calls to them — what problem they cannot stop thinking about, what community they feel connected to. We give them mentorship, research support, and wherever possible, the chance to see the work on the ground before they build a campaign around it. We connect them with nonprofits whose work we know and trust. And then we get out of the way.
The students who come through that process are not completing an assignment. They are starting something. They can tell you, months later, exactly what happened with the money. They come back. They bring others.
Service learning should produce that. Not a line on a transcript and a receipt from a for-profit platform.
India has a generation of young people who are more globally aware, more socially conscious, and more capable of building real change than any system currently gives them credit for. The infrastructure they are handed should reflect that.
Udayaa exists because we believe it can.
If you are a student with a cause, or a school looking for a better model for service learning, we want to hear from you. No setup fee. No platform percentage. No template waiting. Reach us at udayaa.org.
