Tina Brunet was sitting in a classroom in Kolkata when a teenage girl stood up to present her collage. The brief was simple: cut out images and words that show where you are now and where you want to be in ten years. The girl had chosen pictures of beaches, foreign countries and aeroplanes. She wanted to be an air hostess. She still used the old word.
Tina asked her why.
“I really want to travel,” the girl said.
What followed was a conversation that neither of them will forget. Tina told her that travel does not have to come with the job — that you can travel anywhere in the world on your own terms. The girl had never heard this before. Nobody in the slum where she lived had ever suggested it was possible.
“They have no role models in their life that talk to them about these things. They don’t get asked why,” Tina recalls.
That moment is exactly what Full Circle Social Enterprises was built for.
Tina Brunet is the founder and CEO of Full Circle, an Australian-registered charity working with schools and communities in India to expand choice, agency and opportunity for young people growing up in poverty. She is 50, Mumbai-born, raised in Melbourne from the age of nine, and as she cheerfully admits, “a little bit all over the place” when it comes to her background.
Her career has moved through IT, ten years at World Vision under CEO Tim Costello, work with blind youth at Vision Australia and five years at Monash University, where she was recently made redundant. Full Circle is what happened when all of that collided with COVID.
“I thought, if I want to make this world a better place, what is it that I’m actually doing that’s going to leave something more meaningful — a legacy not for my sake, but for the people I’m impacting.”
The idea grew from a leadership program she had developed at Vision Australia for blind youth transitioning from school to university. “They came in very timid, not knowing what they were capable of. They left the program completely different people.” She began looking at what was available for underprivileged young people in India and found a gap. Programs existed, but they were designed around solutions, not people.
“I’m a human-centred practitioner. Everything starts with the person.”
She found Future Hope, a school in Kolkata near Sonagachi, one of the largest red-light districts in Asia. The school serves children who would otherwise have nothing — orphans, children of sex workers, kids rescued from debt bondage. It was already doing the hard foundational work. What it lacked was leadership development.
Getting the partnership started was not easy. It was COVID. Emails to India, as Tina will tell you with a wry laugh, do not always get answered. Eventually she found herself in India on a Monash research trip and made a decision. She flew to Kolkata, walked into the school and introduced herself. “I said, hello, I’m here. I’m a real person. I have these ideas. Will you please give me a go.”
The school’s CEO, Sujata Sen, watched her sit in classrooms, eat with the kids, watch them play soccer. Then she said yes.
The curriculum that followed was not written in Melbourne. Tina returned with five volunteers, ran workshops, spoke to students, teachers, community leaders and local employers. The curriculum came from listening. “It’s not going to be me designing it from Australia.”
Five years on, Full Circle has trained seven teachers, employed one leadership coach, reached just over 100 students and completed ten modules. The model is deliberately slow — Tina wants the program to demonstrate proof of concept before expanding.
The stories that emerge are the truest measure of all. One boy arrived at Future Hope having run away from debt bondage in Nepal, where he had been handed to a creditor after his father could not repay a loan. He slept with cows for warmth. He met Future Hope students by chance and left with them. He is now a sports coach. His brother stayed behind. “The power of knowing that there are options,” Tina says quietly. “That there are pathways that look different to the one you believe you’re destined for.”
The biggest challenge is money. Five years of fundraising events have left Tina exhausted. Her deepest disappointment has been the Indian diaspora. “I would love people to see this as an opportunity to give back to India. That hasn’t happened the way I hoped.”
The ten-year plan is to make Full Circle redundant — to establish a mirror organisation in India, locally led and locally funded, that eventually takes over entirely. “Why would I pay myself $100,000 a year when I can have three or four people in India doing the work on the ground?”
Tina grew up rejecting Indian culture — the expectations placed on good Indian girls, the limits that were never placed on her brothers. For a long time she did not know whether she was allowed to love India, having pushed back against so much of it. This work has helped her reconcile.
“I don’t wear a sari but that doesn’t make me not Indian. I can be Indian in my heart. And that is my identity.”
Her rebellion, it turns out, was never about rejecting India. It was about rejecting the idea that any girl, anywhere, should be told she has limits.
In helping other young people discover their agency, she finally found her own.
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