Meeting the Mentors: Nipun Mehta

Mr. Nipun Mehta

Nipun Bhai is the founder of ServiceSpace, an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and gift-economy. What started as an experiment with four friends in the Silicon Valley has now grown to a global ecosystem of over 500,000 members that has delivered millions of dollars in service for free. Nipun Bhai, by the third year of his Computer Science and Philosophy degree at UC Berkeley, started his software career at Sun Microsystems. Dissatisfied by the dot-com greed of the late 90s, Nipun went to a homeless shelter with three friends to "give with absolutely no strings attached." They ended up creating a website, and also an organization named ServiceSpace. Over the years, they built thousands of websites for nonprofits but also started incubating a diverse set of projects that included online portals DailyGood and KarmaTube, offline movements like Smile Cards, a pay-it-forward rickshaw in India, and Karma Kitchen restaurants in three cities across the US. In 2001, at the age of 25, Nipun quit his job to become a "full time volunteer." He didn't have a plan of survival beyond six months.

In January 2005, Nipun and Guri, his wife of six months, put everything aside to embark on an open-ended, unscripted walking pilgrimage in India, to "use their hands to do random acts of kindness, their heads to profile inspiring people, and their hearts to cultivate truth." Living on a dollar a day, eating wherever food was offered, sleeping wherever a flat surface was found, the couple walked 1000 kilometers before ending up at a retreat center, where they meditated for three months. Today, both Nipun Bhai and Guri live in Berkeley and stay rooted in a practice of small acts of service.

His Projects like Smile Cards and Moved by Love really support this shift, holding external space is about sharing our inner transformation in our local communities. Projects like Awakin circles and Karma Kitchen are good examples of this. And lastly, living in a hyper-connected era, we leverage online technology as well -- with projects like DailyGood and KarmaTube

Nipun Bhai has received many awards, including the Jefferson Award for Public Service, Wavy Gravy's Humanitarian award, and Dalai Lama's Unsung Hero of Compassion. In 2015, President Barack Obama appointed him to a council on poverty and inequality. He is routinely invited to share his message of "giftivism" to wide ranging audiences, from inner city youth in Memphis to academics in London to international dignitaries at the United Nations; his speech at UPenn commencement in May 2012 was read by millions. He serves on the advisory boards of the Seva Foundation, the Dalai Lama Foundation, and Greater Good Science Center.

Nipun Bhai's mission statement in life now reads: "Bring smiles in the world and stillness in my heart."

Here is a short video capturing his spirit.