35 years on and Tim's charity still full of hope

IF YOU believe rugby is the ultimate team sport – which I still do – it is tempting to superimpose all its many fine qualities into other team environments.

- BRENDAN GALLAGHER

The Armed Forces and many big corporations love to align themselves with the rugby ethos but the best example of the rugby spirit and values infiltrating and improving another seemingly unrelated facet of life I have witnessed is the Future Hope charity in Kolkata, which was founded by Tim Grandage and his wife Erica to rescue, save, nourish and educate abandoned or orphaned street children before launching them into fulfilled adulthood. The number of such individuals is currently nudging toward 4,000.

Paris restaurant owners, noted architects and artists, concierges at six-star hotels in Dubai, doctors, nurses, midwives, teachers, actors – you can run into a Future Hope alumni anywhere.

Future Hope is celebrating its 35th anniversary and Tim, who has always guarded his pupils’ privacy and dignity fiercely, invited the broadcast media into Future Hope Rowland Road headquarters so they and their teachers and helpers can tell the story fully. Hence Hope within the Mango Trees, a podcast which I commend to your attention and which plays out over eight episodes.

Spearheading this project has been Alastair Eykyn and Jonathan Over-end, highly accomplished broadcasting all-rounders who tell the story skillfully but very much take a back seat, indeed if I didn’t namecheck them here you would scarcely know of their involvement. Ali of course is now one of TNT’s lead rugby commentators and his Future Hope introduction was not untypical, finding himself next to Tim at a rugby dinner. Like many before him he found Tim’s invitation to ‘nip over’ to Kolkata hard to resist and within no time Ali, his wife and their children were all helping out at various times as volunteers.