Virtualahan

Building an ecosystem for People with Disabilities to thrive using technology!

1 out of 7 people in the world has a disability and as a result of their condition, these people have significantly low access to gainful employment primarily because of employment discrimination. I’m one of them.

Many companies close their doors to people like us who has medical, psychosocial and/or physical disabilities. Often times, we are denied with our basic right to make a decent living. For most of our lives, we are not given the opportunity to pursue our dreams and live our purpose. 

That's why I founded Virtualahan and we created an impact formula that combines digital skills training, employment and entrepreneurship support, life-coaching through wellbeing sessions and community building programs. We have a strong focus on economic empowerment, good health and well-being, reducing inequality and restoring human dignity. 

Our impact formula has been proven and validated after impacting 150K+ lives through our community building programs. We also have successfully trained 162 skilled workers with 76% employment rate in 50+ cities all over the Philippines. Lenovo awarded us with Outstanding Tech Visionary Award and we also won the Google Business Stories Award for effectively using technology for impact.

Are impact formula are now being used to other disadvantaged communities like the Indigenous People in Sultan Kudarat and former drug addicts in Cebu. We also have people who wish to bring our solutions to help the elderly, veterans, and refugees in Iraq.

We are committed to building the future of work that fully inclusive. We are committed to reimagining and redefining how people perceived disability by transforming disadvantaged communities to become leaders of our society. We are committed to our mission of leaving no one behind!

Virtualahan is a 100% digital social enterprise which makes our operations lean and highly scalable. Our impact formula can be used to any target groups in any geographic locations. Our innovation leverage on technology of the future and the core values of the past.

What makes Virtualahan more special is bringing jobs at the comfort of their home unlike most livelihood programs disadvantaged communities that are focused on traditional manual labors.

We have taken advantage of the power of the internet and the growing outsourcing in the Philippines to make people become productive and leaders of our society.

1. Our six weeks digital skills training is 100% online which allows us to cater to all types of disabilities in any location with internet connectivity.

2. 90% of our employment and entrepreneurship support is done online too through our virtual business training and executive coaching. Only the site visits and demo day is done in-person.

3. Our well-being sessions is 80% online. We have weekly virtual community-based therapy and monthly in-person support groups.

4. Our community building efforts is 70% online through our Facebook live series featuring our impact stories, social experiments through video campaigns, and other online events.

1. Train 200 disadvantaged people.

2. Incubate 15 businesses started by our community members.

3. Launch Virtualahan for Kids with the goal to train parents and caregivers of kids with disabilities from low-income communities to do home-based therapies using clinical methods.

4. Launch Virtualahan TV, a Facebook live mini-series that talks about different medical condition and disabilities to educate the public and create positive awareness towards various issues.

5. Test the Virtualahan Impact Formula in at least 3 different economies, culture, languages, and target groups to fully develop the system that would allow us to open source our solution.

1. We are committed to impacting 1M lives of People with Disabilities globally by continuously improving our impact formula, influence stronger policies, and increase awareness using the power of tech.

2. Expand to other disadvantaged communities such as the Maori Youth Community in New Zealand, young refugees in Iraq, war veterans in USA, and elderly communities in Nepal. 

3. Onboard technology companies to become leaders in diversity and inclusion with a strong commitment to hiring disadvantaged people so they can get long-term gainful employment.

4. Build more leaders and champions for diversity and inclusion.

1. Our potential beneficiaries and strategic partners connects with us through our website and social media pages.

2. We use Google Apps, Facebook Groups, Messenger's Group Chat, and Slack Channels for our ongoing skills training, weekly life-coaching and well-being session, events, and other community building programs.

3. Our strong focus on co-creation for organizational growth keeps our community members busy, involved and highly engaged.

4. Our purpose is our strong cord.

We have successfully trained 200+ people with 76% employment rate in 50+ cities nationwide. We have also  impacted an additional 150,000+ people through our community building programs and events. Our community members also earn 20-30% higher than the minimum wage and reports 49% increase of income after one year of completing the program.

You can read more about our impact on our impact stories page at www.virtualahan.com/stories 

1. We are committed to training 500+ disadvantaged people to become online professionals or digital entrepreneurs using our impact formula.

2. We are committed to incubating and accelerating 15 businesses through our one year business fellowship program.

3. We are committed to impacting 100K people through our community building programs and advocacy campaigns. 

4. We plan to grow the team in the Philippines to 30 people and build teams in various areas that we are targeting to expand. 

We have a very strong team and highly engaged community working together in fulfilling our mission.

We are a diverse team of social entrepreneurs, community builders, educators, mental health expert, experienced outsourcing consultants, and advocates. We are very good at storytelling, process building and bootstrapping. 

We are also mentored by seasoned executives and serial entrepreneurs who works in multiple industries from education, impact investment, management consulting, sustainability and artificial intelligence. We are very good relationship builders and collaboration partners.

We make money in 4 major ways:

1. Training Fee using a cross-subsidy and corporate model married with the pay-it-forward mechanism. The training cost $500 per scholar and we have people and organizations who provides scholarships so our beneficiaries don't need to pay anything upfront provided that they sponsor a scholar after 10 months of completing our program.

2. Subscription from our clients who avails our outsourcing services which focuses on Customer Service, Data Management, Back-office and Blockchain and A.I. support.

3. Referral fee from our employment partners for direct placement.

4. Grants for government and INGOs who contracts us as implementing partners.

We believe that Solve can direct us to the right people, organizations, resources and other collaboration partners who can help us scale our impact by giving us the platform to sell our vision.

Awareness. Solve can put us out there and allow us to open the minds of people to address the long neglected issue faced by People with Disabilities and other disadvantaged groups.