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Alumna teaches hope in the slums of IndiaMany people talk of how great it would be to help educate the less fortunate, but Sharon Jayakumar is making it happen every day in India.

This Thunderbird graduate has established a nonprofit with her mother that helps impoverished young women from the slums of Bangalore.

Jayakumar stays busy in Philadelphia as a global brand manager for AstraZeneca, but her heart is with the young women of Bangalore, where she was born. Her nonprofit there is called Baghya — which translates to “second chance.”

“Our first goal is to get some of these girls out of a terrible location,” she says. “Many living in the slums have no parents, and we work to put them in boarding school and fund their education.”

She says some of the older girls haven’t been in school, so her organization teaches them computer skills and helps them find work.

After time as a marketing specialist and manager for Orbit Satellite Television and Radio Network and then Microsoft Corp., Jayakumar enrolled at Thunderbird to broaden her horizons.

“My time there gave me business skills, but more importantly, it gave me a certain community of people I feel I belonged with,” she says. “I wanted to be a citizen of the world.”

It was that desire that helped her to found her nonprofit in India, but it also helps her at AstraZeneca, where she’s the global brand manager for Seroquel, a drug that treats schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The drug does $4 billion a year in global sales, ranking it as the fifth-largest drug in the world.

Jayakumar says about three-quarters of the drug’s sales are in the United States, but she spends much of her time growing that brand overseas.

As a woman from Bangalore whose mother, grandmother and great-grandmother all worked when she was growing up, she says the sky is the limit for women in school now.

“They need to understand that the world is their oyster,” she says. “There are so many opportunities out there for everyone.”