From street kids to university graduates: how former HSBC banker and his charity Future Hope give homeless children in India a shot at life

Tim Grandage arrived in Calcutta from Hong Kong in 1987 to begin a two-year posting as manager of a local branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). Each day when he parked his car around the corner from the bank, he was distressed to see a group of street children eking out a living from other people’s leftovers.

“One night when I went to pick up the car, the children crowded around me, all speaking at once,” Grandage says. “I didn’t understand much but knew they were worried it would get stolen and they would be blamed by the police.”

Grandage let the children sleep inside, under or on the car if they protected it from thieves. As his friendship with them grew, he became determined to do something for them. Before long he had turned his apartment into a home for 35 children sleeping safely on the floor and eating three regular meals a day.

“I realised then that I was committed to the children,” says Grandage, who set up a non-profit organisation called Future Hope in 1987. “I named it so because children are the hope of India’s future. I founded it not out of pity for street children, but admiration.”

Within a couple of years he left HSBC and enlisted the bank’s support for his new charity.

Over the past 32 years Future Hope has transformed the lives of at least 3,000 children by taking them off the streets and out of the slums of the city, now called Kolkata and the capital of West Bengal state, and giving them a home, medical care and an education. It has saved many from prostitution, drugs and poverty. Some of these children, who had no ambition when they arrived at the home, are now becoming lawyers, engineers, bankers and teachers.