How Dushyant Dubey aka St Broseph on Reddit is helping people in distress

TW: Mention of death by suicide online

Dushyant Dubey is Bengaluru’s superhero—the city’s friendly neighbourhood good Samaritan and a humanitarian who goes by the moniker St Broseph on the social media platform Reddit.

Today, Dubey’s work has led to a St Broseph’s Army of 5,300 volunteers in Bengaluru alone and the St Broseph’s Foundation, which helps people in distress.

On average, he gets around 100 cases in a day, including civic issues, crimes, scams, and some even as inane as how to get rid of a gecko in a home. In the process, he has learned to deal with the police in the city, the penal codes, and important laws—through the St Broseph’s Foundation.

A self-taught techie and digital marketing expert, Dubey has been tinkering with computers and making money from a very young age. He switched to the open schooling system when he was in the ninth standard and completed his degree in commerce. Meanwhile, he continued doing what he did best–designing websites and dabbling in digital marketing for clients.

At home in Ahmedabad, his father, an industrialist ran a nursery exclusively to donate plants and saplings and support folk artists during this free time. Dubey’s upbringing with an emphasis on philanthropy and empathy has always stood in good stead over the years.

The turning point too, came quite early in life when he was just 16 years old. In 2007, when Dubey was on a fitness website, where he was a regular, he saw that a person from the Miami in Florida in the US had posted a thread with a link that he was going to die by an overdose on live stream and had attached a note as well.

How life as he knew it, changed

“I opened the link, the person was lying on the bed, the streaming was on, and he took the pills. I was reading the comments and people were egging him on. It was quite evil to see how people were reacting to the situation. My first instinct was to do something about it. When I asked others in the group if they could call the local police, people reacted by saying that the whole thing was a stunt,” Dubey tells SocialStory.

Dubey sent an email to the Miami Police Department that bounced. He then called the number mentioned on the department’s website, only to have the person at the other end transfer the line to four policemen. In the end, he was told that he would have to call the sheriff of another county.

Dubey did not give up, and dialed the sheriff of Broward County and he was told that they had already received a call and were on their way to investigate.

“When I went back to the stream, I saw the police bursting into the room; and they covered the camera. A few hours later, his sister posted that he had died. When I woke up the next day, I had a thousand messages in my inbox, most of them saying the world needs more people like me. I felt like a failure because I couldn’t convince others to help,” he adds.

The incident changed Dubey, who was previously entrepreneurial-driven and focused on making more money, in many ways. He started volunteering with different organisations, starting with animal rescue in his home city.

In 2016, he moved to Bengaluru to understand more about the startup ecosystem and continued to volunteer with social organisations, working for tribal welfare, helping in organising blood donation camps, health camps, installing solar heaters, and more. 

“I started attending events and connecting to important people and my network of connections in the social space grew over time,” he says.

Taking off from Reddit

Dubey had been active on Reddit and created the St Broseph account in 2013, organising community events and meetups. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he made a conscious decision not to leave the city but stay back to help those in need. He used his savings to distribute food to people and volunteered with BBMPs helplines to help migrants with help.

When people started returning to the city after the end of the second wave, Dubey was the moderator of r/bangalore on Reddit and saw a litany of posts on different issues in the city. There was a post on the rise of phone snatchings in Indiranagar and how the police were not filing FIRs.

“I went to the police station and helped the people as I was quite adept at such stuff. Meanwhile on the posts, there would be victim-blaming and trolling, and most often only mine would be one of sane voices of advice with an offer to help. Soon, people started tagging different posts on Reddit, which led me to make to write a post asking people to contact me directly, he says.

The post blew up and Dubey found himself receiving several messages from people in Bengaluru.

Two of the high-profile cases he has worked on include the attack on a trans person and the death by suicide of a college student in the city.

In the first instance, the police took the FIR on two counts. Dubey, after a detailed conversation with the victims made sure that the FIR was updated with the crime under 16 other IPCs. The police finally caught three of the four perpetrators.

Over a year ago, Dubey left his job at Mahindra to dedicate his time to social work. Aiding him in his efforts is the St Broseph’s Army of 5,300 people in Bengaluru, 500 people in Hyderabad, and 100 in Chennai.

He elaborates, “We have 10 chapters in Bengaluru and each one has anywhere between 20 and 50 coordinators, split between 10 roles that include animal welfare, civic issues, activities, mental health, news, and information. My ask is to give me just half an hour every day, according to their convenience.”

Allied activities

So far, Dubey has relied on his savings to fund his work. “I lead a frugal life so that I can use the money to help people. For the past two years, I have been paying Rs 30,000 a month for mental therapy for people. My estimate is that my savings will last me another year,” he says.

He's also the co-founder and Creative Director of Nammawalls, an art collective that aims to transform public walls with art showcasing history and culture, with its popular 100-wall painting series "Freedom Wall" adorning Indiranagar and several other spots in Bengaluru, including the "Kreeda Junction"—an area below the Richmond Circle flyover that sports murals of Karnataka’s cricketing greats—near St. Joseph's University.

The organisation also has an RTI and Legal cell for free legal support, a Careers team to support individuals in need of jobs, and a women's wing known as Abbakka Brigade for women's issues and empowerment initiatives.

The organisation's headquarters has a library, food prepared and served every day for volunteers as well as a small dormitory.

The St. Broseph Foundation also runs several safe spaces known as the St. Broseph Safehouses, which are fully furnished apartments offering free accommodation and security to victims of crime who are physically at risk.

He is also in the process of registering St Broseph’s Foundation as a non-profit so that he can apply for grants.

“It’s not just fearlessness that keeps me going. There’s a little bit of reason and loads of madness and craziness. And not to forget the brazenness. I’m blessed that I don’t have any dependents or must worry about my family. Yeah, that's another one. So basically, I think it's just the fearlessness. I want this to become an entity that doesn’t require me in the next five to ten years. Eventually, I want to just become a footnote,” he says as he signs off.

(The copy has been updated to correct a factual error on the number of perpetrators arrested.)