Light Lives

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About Us

The best way to build a better socio-sensible platform is to “Start from the School”

Together for a brighter future

Every child in this world deserves better academic and non academic inputs during their growing up days. Both economically forward and backward students miss out on important skills and values education at schools as most schools focus on academics but miss out the critical life skills which play a very crucial role in future life

The students are shaped through an intensive year-around HeadStart LEAD program incorporated into their regular school time-table to cultivate skills such as self-leadership, making the right choices, effective communication, people skills, achievement approaches and skills, creativity and problem solving, future-ready tools and challenging activities.

  • Many children tend to grow up focused on their academics but miss out on building the KEY SKILLS and VALUES they will need to lead successful and meaningful personal and professional lives.
  • This skill and value gap is usually addressed through a ‘REPAIR’ job often in their first job in the work-world. The ‘PREPARE’ job at school is what will really make an EARLY and LASTING difference.
  • Students are often prepared to be ‘memory machines’ rather than the ‘curious, confident, creative’ individuals they need to be.
  • Teachers are often under pressure to cover the syllabus and rarely have the time or exposure to focus on the skills and values that the children need to be equipped with beyond academic knowledge. 
  • Parents – are often limited in their capacity and availability to plug this gap.

Our Vision Creating Tomorrow’s Leaders – Today

  • LightLives is focussed on providing leadership skills and values training to children at all types of schools and orphanages
  • Our conviction: Do the ‘prepare’ job at school right, you will not need a ‘repair’ job later.
  • Light Lives seeks to bring these advantages to under-privileged children who have the talent and skills but who are often denied the opportunity to grow and develop those talents and skills.
  • TalentEase was founded by senior management professionals who were drawn to fixing the skill and value gap in society and the workplace by working with children and young adults.

Get to Know the Team

Leo & Teresa Fernandez

Managing Trustees

Peter Ghooi

Project Lead & Institution Engagement

Ramona Viswanathan

Trustee

Debolina Ghosh

Lead - Corporate Social Responsibility Growth

Yentl D'Silva

Talent & Delivery

K S Raghavendra

Technology

Leadership Team

Leo Fernandez

Managing Trustee
Leo is a former Partner/Managing Director at Accenture, Singapore and now plays the role of CEO at TalentEase. He brings a passion for creating possibilities and making a difference. With 18 years of outsourcing leadership experience, Leo has spent his career building high-performance teams, crafting winning partnerships with clients and developing solutions for business change. He has also worked as a Region COO with Hewitt Associates and has led export operations for companies within the Tata Group. He is currently based at Hyderabad; India He has a Bachelor’s in Economics and a Master’s in Business Administration. Married to Teresa and have two children Marcus (11th Grade) & Marcela (7th grade).

Peter Ghooi

Operations Head
Peter has a degree in Foreign Trade and has experience working in the export and domestic textile industry for more than 25 years. He has handled various business activities including production planning and control, sourcing, marketing and business development at various companies such as Gokaldas Exports and Tata International. With an interest in social business, he started work at TalentEase in 2014 and looks after client engagement, business development and the LightLives outreach initiative. He is married to Mamta and has two children Pritam and Punita. He plays the saxophone.

Advisory Board

Sanjay Seth

Sanjay Seth has spent around three decades in the corporate world across various organizations, although of this period, he has spent more than two decades with Accenture. Early in his career, Sanjay developed his skills working with engineering and manufacturing organizations. He then spent close to ten years as a Management Consultant with Accenture, advising clients in India, largely in the manufacturing sector. Post this, Sanjay moved over to the Outsourcing industry, briefly in the IT sector before spending the last fifteen years in BPO. Apart from the above, Sanjay is an avid sportsperson and enjoys outdoors, racquet games and adventure sports.

Ed Valenzuela

Ed Valenzuela spent 16 years in various consulting, IT and outsourcing positions. He lived and worked on five continents and was proficient in Finance and Accounting, Human Resource processes, Procurement and IT services. He attended the University of Notre Dame and the University of Missouri for his undergraduate degree in Finance/Accounting and the University of Dallas for his MBA. He is married with three children and three grandchildren, and enjoys reading, mineral collecting and hiking in the mountains.
Ed supports charity causes and contributes his time, expertise and money to charity events in the Colorado region.

Harish Devarajan

Harish is the CEO/Founder of People Unlimited. He is a Leadership Coach and formerly the VP of human Resources at Hindustan Unilever - India. Harish Devarajan has over 27 years of experience in the corporate and consulting sectors. His current focus is leadership development both at an individual level which is in the form of executive coaching and at a team level which is in terms of top team effectiveness coaching. Member of Statutory and Advisory Boards of companies. Through leadership development, other related interventions and Board membership he seeks to help organisations enhance their performance.

Ramakrishna Reddy

Ramakrishna is the Founder and overall head of Manthan School and is primarily responsible for its strategy, philosophy and value system. An M.Phil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and with an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad. Ramakrishna employs innovative methodologies in teaching to make learning fun, relevant and impactful. His goal is to keep the broader social perspective alive while running the school as a professional institution. He teaches Business Studies and Global Perspectives and Research to students in grades 11 and 12.

Our Facilitator Team