Yadavindra Public School awards King Constantine Medal to Vinay Goyal

Posted: 04 January 2022

Yadavindra Public School awarded this years King Constantine Medal to Vinay Goyal for his dedication to serving differently abled people within his community.

In 2019 Vinay along with Arshjot Nagpal Co-founded ‘The Advantage India’ an organisation which betters the lives of people with disabilities by overcoming the additional barriers that society can impose on them.

“I was diagnosed with epilepsy at the beginning of high school, and so I’ve always felt a connection to the differently-abled community. I’ve always wanted to do something for “my” community in particular, and I believe that establishing a non-profit organisation that serves as a pathway to employment, education, and training is the first step toward a society that is less discriminatory and more accepting. And I believe that through my social enterprise, I can continue to empower more and more people across the country, as well as help society to become a little more accepting of the differences that make us unique.”

Through their persistent calls and enquiry emails the organisation has now joined hands with some of India’s most well-known NGO’s and corporate companies. In total they collaborated with 15 foundations and 16 companies. They have collaborated with NGOs like NABET India (National Accreditation Board for Education and Training), AIF (American Indian Foundation) and Ek Koshish School to provide candidates with required vocational training for jobs.

“Following the training, our recruitment and HR teams used to work together to place our candidates in companies where they can excel, such as the hospitality industry, retail, food and beverage, and data entry. …We were even able to place a few of our candidates at Amazon and Mahindra Tech.”

In addition to their vocational training classes, Advantage India offers counselling, therapy sessions, personality development, confidence building classes. “We even developed new programmes for our career platform with our candidates’ emotional and mental growth in mind. Inviting professional counsellors, entrepreneurs, guest speakers, and other social influencers to share their expertise, we organised various counselling and career guidance workshops for our candidates” explains Vinay. They pioneered an expressive art program which “broke down recruitment managers” mental barriers and helped many candidates demonstrate their abilities: an innovative and unheard-of approach in the industry.

Over the years the team has remarkably helped approximately 5500 differently abled young people find jobs nationwide. They even helped seven candidates gain the expertise required to start a small business and become self-employed.

Since having received the medal, Vinay took part in a summer program for high school entrepreneurs called Launch X, which is a competitive and highly selective program to gain more knowledge about how to build a start-up and be a successful entrepreneur. His team launched ‘EcoFilter’, an environmentally driven organisation which ‘aspire[s] to reduce the carbon footprint created by fuel driven vehicles, by installing carbon filters to them.’ And using the collected Carbon particles to form useful products like plastic, black ink and paint.

“Through Launch X, I was able to meet and work with some amazing students from across the world and learn so much.” Discussing his whole professional and educational journey Vinay says “I’ve learned that leadership is when a person learns to be responsible for his and others actions and knows what he/she is doing is right for society. And service is something when you just give back to society. I believe that a person cannot learn leadership and service in a single day, but it takes small steps to develop a person into a society leader. Round Square is an ideal platform for this because it allows students to collaborate with people from all over the world and work in teams, which helps them develop leadership skills while working on service projects helps us develop compassion.”

Vinay has been nominated for a ‘V- award’ which recognises and celebrates 10 extraordinary young people who are making the world a better place through their acts of volunteerism. Vinay will be attending the ceremony on the 3rd of December 2021, the international Volunteers Day.

Commenting On Vinay’s journey at Yadavindra, the School Rep Simrat Malhotra says “Since the time I first met Vinay, I was amazed to see his zeal to do something constructive to help the underprivileged people of the society. During the Lockdown following the Pandemic, he gathered a few like-minded people together and started helping the ones who were worst affected. When he started The Advantage India, we were a little sceptical about its success but, his tireless efforts bore fruit and he made this venture a success. I am proud of his achieve and wish him luck in his future endeavours.”

Vinay has since graduated and is currently taking a Gap Year to pursue his interests in coding, learning new programming languages, independent research and gaining work experience. When the pandemic improves, he aims to solo travel abroad. “I hope to learn a new language, live like a local, and meet new people. Following my Gap Year, I intend to pursue my undergraduate studies in the United States, with Computer Science as my primary concentration.”