Welcome to Friends Of Young Minds (FOYM)

FOYM is a student organization committed to helping children from financially handicapped regions of the world. We strongly believe that the best gift one can give these children is the gift of education. FOYM's focus is towards the transfer of equipment and expertise so that children in such parts of the world can have a more fulfilling education.

In addition to contributing to an infrastructure for wide-reaching education, FOYM is particularly concerned with stimulating and motivating young minds to pursue a course of education. Such efforts are particularly important in scenarios where children enter the work force at an early age primarily because education's long term rewards are lost on them. Our goal is to work towards projecting education as a reward in itself—as an entertaining, enjoyable, and intellectually stimulating exercise, which we like to refer to as fun education.

FOYM is currently involved in organizing a network to collect old computers, mainly PCs, from individuals and institutions to make them available to children in developing regions of the world. We believe that the rapid obsolescence of computers and the consequent proliferation of cheap outdated computers as well as the potential use of computers to project education as an entertaining and enjoyable experience make this drive particularly relevant to our goals. FOYM is also involved in a similar book-collection drive and other local community services. We have an ongoing pilot project in India. Based on the success and lessons learnt from this project we envision establishing similar initiatives in other developing countries.

FOYM was founded in September 1996 and currently has two chapters—one at Rice University, Texas, and the other at Mumbai, India, both of which have been very active since their inception. We are a small, but dynamic, group of people. Please explore our web-site to see our current activities and directions.

 

“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.” –Addison