A Letter From Our Founder

Dear Visitor,

My name is Gayatri Mathur and I’m the founder and CEO of the Soondra Foundation

Soondra Bai Tawdé was my nanny growing up and she is the inspiration for everything we do at The Soondra Foundation.

Her story begins in 1960s rural India, where options were few for a childless, illiterate widow. Determined to escape poverty, she became a household helper for my family before I was born.

I grew up with Soondra as a family member, she embraced my brother and me as her own. She was hardworking, loving, sincere, and funny. She even helped take care of my kids during my visits back to India. She grew old with us and passed in August of 1997.

I started my career as a physical therapist in Mumbai. I then came to the United States as a graduate student. I’ve worked in Sydney, Australia, Iowa and the Chicago area as a clinician, researcher and a professor. While I loved my work with patients, I started looking for a new career path to expand the impact of my work.

The issue of healthcare access has always been with me since my earliest days as a physical therapy student. As a student in a large public hospital in Mumbai I first saw the interaction between finances, or rather the lack of finances and healthcare. I remember working with patients who did not have the bus fare to get home from Mumbai to their villages.

On a visit to Mumbai in November 2016, my mother’s maid’s toddler fell and fractured his skull, requiring hospitalization. The cost of getting an MRI was equivalent to two months of her salary. She faced a decision: pay up or not take care of her son. I feel this is a bleak choice that no one should ever have to make.

Her choice was not unique. Many working poor Indians experiencing medical emergencies are forced to pay out-of-pocket, often selling land and livestock or borrowing from loan sharks at predatory rates to cover costs. This plunges them into financial catastrophe and intergenerational poverty, even for an ailment as easily fixed as a fracture.

The maid’s incident triggered my previous experiences of people in similar life situations with no rainy-day savings for medical emergencies. I also thought about my Soondra. Her courage to create her own wellbeing drives me today to work for people like her– hardworking individuals who have few advocates.

In September 2017 I was invited to join the incubator at the University of Chicago’s prestigious Polsky Exchange. The incubator environment provided me with the ability to start the Soondra Foundation and we received our tax exemption in July 2018.

Since then we have helped numerous families when they are faced with two catastrophic crises: a medical problem which brings on a financial one as well. Our relatively small grants usually between $25 – $400, create outsize impacts of saving lives and avoiding a poverty trap.

Please join my amazing team and me to provide a safety net to someone in desperate need.

Sincerely,

Gayatri Mathur