About our Founder

Our founder was recently featured in the Citizen One column in the London Free Press. Unfortunately, there were a few small mistakes in the article so we've taken the liberty of putting up a corrected version of Joe Matyas' article here.

Occupation

Retired Fanshawe College professor, founding director of non-profit Village Education and Development Society.

Profile

Mukkattu was born and raised in a poor family in India. One of seven children, he had a good education, thanks to parents who made sacrifices for him. He became a teacher in his home state of Kerala and later taught in Kenya. He emigrated to Canada in 1968, earned a master's degree in ecology at the University of Western Ontario and attended Althouse College of education. He taught environmental technology at London's Fanshawe College from 1974 to 2008. He managed programs in India for the London branch of the Save A Family Plan. In 2001, he founded the society to help poor women in Kerala start self-sustaining micro-businesses. His organization has helped 2,000 people and sponsored 14 nurses and four engineers.

Motivation

Mukkattu feels blessed by God. As a person who now has advantages, he feels a responsibility to do for others what his parents did for him. He wants the society to become big enough to warrant matching grants from the Canadian International Development Agency. Impact of Canadian dollars are magnified many times in India, he says

Canada has given me so much. God would not be happy if I didn't use my good fortune to help others. It's my passion now.