How a teenager used football to raise Rs 6.5 lakh for a cancer foundation for children

Meet Sheel Soneji, a 17-year-old boy who used football as a tool to help donate to charity. While most kids his age were busy spending their summer vacations relaxing or having fun, Sheel had other plans – to do something useful with his free time.

Sheel is a student of India International School studying for his International Baccalaureate (IB). In 2014, he organized a football tournament called ‘Cheesy Neurons’ with the aim of raising money for Samiksha Foundation – a charity that cares for children with cancer and provides them with an education while they undergo treatment.

“My friends and I had been going to Samiksha Foundation to teach the kids verbal English,” he says. “I decided to take this one step further by organizing a football tournament and a family day event at Play Arena in Bangalore.

How much was Sheel able to collect? “I raised upwards of Rs. 6.5 lakhs, all of which was donated to [the] charity,” he says with a beam of accomplishment.

This year, as he applied to universities in Canada, one question on the application forms stood out – what was the student’s contribution to the fees? “In the US and Canada, if you are 16 or 17, you are legally allowed to work. That’s not the case in India. You have to be 18 to legally work.”

17-year-old Sheel Soneji has successfully organized two football tournaments

So Sheel took matters into his own hands and this time organized the tournament to help fund his higher studies. “I wanted to change this trend, make a trend of youth independence, and that’s why I organized this tournament.”

The 2015 edition had 12 corporate teams take part along with plenty of sponsors (like Decathlon as venue partners, Uber as mobility partners and Sakra World Hospital as the medical partners) who helped organize the tournament. It was so professionally conducted that there was even an ambulance at the venue in case of an emergency.

It’s remarkable that someone who is not even eligible to vote can put together a football tournament on such a big scale – not once, but twice – that even professional event management organizations can take a cue from this resourceful and enterprising young boy.

“The passion for football is what brought us all together,” he says. And we hope youngsters can take a cue from this and follow in his footsteps.

The tournament was a big success with plenty of teams and sponsors