Kelly McJannett was on a train backpacking in northern India when she saw the sight that would her crystallise her life’s mission.
At 24 she had already worked with Indigenous communities in remote outback Australia, but it was travelling through this seemingly endless slum in Rajasthan and seeing such stark poverty that made her realise she needed to make change on a global scale.
“In big cities of third world countries you are always going to have a circumference of poverty, but I had never seen an Indian slum before,” the Food Ladder International CEO says today. ”It just went on and on. It was a shock.
“I specifically remember the number of children and the look on their faces. I was totally alien in their world. In a place like the slums of India I may as well be from a different planet, when the truth is I am just extraordinarily lucky to have be born with opportunity.”