Supporting VGLUG Foundation

Earlier this year, we gave a grant of INR 5 lakhs to VGLUG Foundation, the Villupuram GNU/Linux Users Group. It is a volunteer-driven non-profit community dedicated to educating students and rural youth in Tamil Nadu.

“This organization is a social movement that works towards enlightening the masses with the essence of free software and to liberate knowledge. Our main objectives are to take forward free software and its ideological implications to all corners of our country from the developed domains to the underprivileged.”    

- from vglug.org

In 2013, a group of volunteers in Villupuram, a district in northern Tamil Nadu, started meeting to talk about GNU/Linux and free software.They began by running weekend meetups and handing out GNU/Linux distributions to anyone in the district who wanted them.

VGLUG conducts open weekend tech meetups to equip rural youth with coding and analytical skills through FOSS technologies, and offer workshops for the general public to educate and to create awareness on virtual privacy, malwares, internet surveillance, cyber security, etc.

They run a FOSS training program for the underprivileged. The volunteers running the program are often part of previous cohorts. This year, 360 beneficiaries were selected, out of 1640 applicants. The beneficiaries included 14 parentless and 47 single parent candidates.

Under the training program, they run free courses on Android and Flutter development, React and Node.js, and, most recently, Python with GenAI, DevOps and cybersecurity. VGLUG has also run skill development and placement programmes with the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation. You can read more about these sessions here.

The Grant

We’re continuing our support for VGLUG Foundation with a grant of INR 5 lakhs this year. This goes towards supporting infrastructure and other operational costs for their ongoing FOSS training program.

If you’d like to support the training program, you can donate to the VGLUG Foundation directly by bank transfer or UPI. If your organisation has a CSR programme, you can reach out to VGLUG Foundation to explore CSR support. Anyone can join VGLUG’s meetups. You can find the group on its mailing list, Telegram, GitHub and YouTube, or read more at vglug.org.

If you’re an Indian FOSS project or community looking for support, please apply here. Find information about the grants program and previous grantees at https://fossunited.org/grants.

If you’re an organisation interested in contributing back to the ecosystem, please reach out to us at maintainers@fossunited.org.