Reasons To Be Cheerful · 7 hours ago

Nobody Taught Them to Adult — So They're Teaching Each Other

Every year in India, roughly 30,000 teenagers age out of state-run childcare to become, as one advocate put it, "nobody's responsibility" - dropped at the edge of adulthood without documents, housing, or anyone to call. Girish Mehta and Anisha Sharma know this threshold intimately; Sharma describes leaving at 18 as being "mid-course, mid-dream, and on my own." Rather than wait for a system that has repeatedly failed to act, they built Careleavers Inner Circle - a peer-led network of over 3,200 members offering job training, counseling, and the kind of late-night phone calls that only someone who has lived the same story can offer. What CLiC understands, and what research confirms, is that being truly seen by someone who has "been there" can replace isolation with belonging in ways that no policy alone can. "By connecting them to companies who train them and eventually hire them," Mehta says, "we're helping our members become truly independent - and yet we stay emotionally connected with them, just like a family would."