The Global Exchange Blog from Deshpande Foundation has moved homes! With the relaunch of our new and improved website all of our blogs can be found here, new and old! Our first new post from the Global Exchange Program has already been posted there: Chiara talks about living in the Sandbox! We’ll see you at our new blog home!
Tags: Check it out!, Moved, New Blog
During my most recent visit to Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled, I inquired about a young man I interviewed for last year’s “Development Dialogue” video. I asked about him because he left a lasting impression on me. Last year, he told me about his daily routine. During his mornings, he would go work at a restaurant where he cleaned the bathrooms. After that, he would come to Samarthanam for English and computer classes. He came to this institution because he wanted a better job and a better future. While interacting with this young man who was blind in one eye, it wasn’t just his story that touched me. When I talked to him, I felt he was being sincere. I never felt like he was telling me these things to get attention; rather, it was to tell me who he was as an individual. When I went back to Samarthanam this time around, I was hoping to hear how this young man has progressed. Unfortunately, what I heard left me feeling uneasy for the next few days.
Tags: Blindness, M.M Joshi Eye Institute, Media Fellow, Orbis International, Sandbox, The Deshpande Foundation
Living in Hubli, where cows wander past my bedroom window, neighborhood children fly kites made of plastic wrappings in the field by the house and trips to schools are met with whispers and questions about where I’m from makes my time teaching in the States seem like a past life. Until the mail arrives.
The mail, traveling from Harrison, New York, to Somerville, Massachusetts to New York City, finally arrives at my house in Hubli when I receive a copy of the Summer 2010 newsletter from the last school where I taught. The principal’s letter talks about alternative routes to certification and the importance of thorough and accurate preparation for teachers in fundamental skills like teaching decoding and reading comprehension. And most interestingly for me, all the reasons why existing programs are not suitable and the actions the state is taking to allow alternative routes to certification.
Four-year olds in South Boston, USA in a summer meals program
Four-year olds in an affordable private school in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
Tags: educational entrepreneurs, innovative teaching practice, private sector
I’ve had some pretty tough jobs in the past, including counseling children with severe emotional and behavioral challenges at Ryther Child Center and advocating for victims of domestic violence in the court system at Family Violence Prevention Center, and while these jobs certainly pushed me, there’s no doubt that my work at DCSE has pushed me to reach a level of professional development that is unparalleled to my previous work.
At times, I feel like EA is a baby that requires constant care and attention. If I’m not pitching to new partners, designing courses, or teaching students, I’m training faculty, designing new marketing materials, or coordinating guest speakers. While I’m very passionate about my work, it is also incredibly draining and there are days in which I really struggle. Throughout the ups and downs, I’ve found that what really keeps me going is the community that I’ve developed here.
Tags: Community, development, Immersion, outsider
Worldwide, the non-profit/social impact sector is characterized by the same set of circumstances: too much to do, and too little time. At Navachetana Foundation, one consequence of these circumstances is that we do not always take full advantage of the external resources available to our organization. This is not because we don’t want to, but because sometimes we are so consumed with our work, and there is so much that needs to be done, that we feel we cannot allocate our time for anything else. Additionally, it is not always clear whether availing of a potential external resource will prove to be highly useful; in some cases external resources can end up providing very minimal benefit to an organization.
Given this context, Navachetana does not often send its staff to trainings or workshops; the thought process behind this is that the time will be better spent accomplishing tangible deliverables in the field or at the office. On a rare occasion, however, a training appears promising enough, and comes so highly recommended, that Navachetana chooses to attend. This was the case with the recent Innovation Workshop for Social Enterprises, led by Parvathi Menon of Innovation Alchemy (and supported by the Marico Innovation Foundation), in which two Navachetana representatives participated. The overall theme of the workshop was catalyzing innovation in the social enterprise sector.
Tags: Impact, Innovation, Scale, Social Entrepreneurship, Workshop
One afternoon last week a RAPID Member entered our office positively glowing. She took out a box of Pedas, a sweet famous in Dharwad, and offered them to everyone in the office, which is a popular way of celebrating a special occasion. She just completed her first month of work in a factory, a placement RAPID helped her to find. She had received her first paycheck and brought some sweets to the RAPID office to celebrate this milestone.
Tags: Grassroots NGO, Impact, livelihoods, Measuring Success, widows
One of my more recent responsibilities at the Deshpande Fellowship Program has been to conduct a weekly class on critical thinking for the current cohort of fellows. I feel that the ability to think critically is something that a person educated in the States is likely to take for granted. I am conscious of this because I find I possess decent critical thinking skills without having formally studied critical thinking. It was therefore a bit of a struggle for me to design a course that would focus solely on developing the fellows’ critical thinking abilities.
After a discussion with Julia Bach, a current Sandbox Fellow who works at the Teacher Foundation, I decided to create a class based around reading The Onion. Fellows in each class were placed in groups of three and assigned one of seven articles whose premise was severely skewed by false facts feeding a satirical idea. For example, one article informed its readers about a recent decision by the US Department of Homeland Security to release five terrorists who were perceived to be the most dangerous in the country for the purpose of providing an opportunity to the US military to test its national security. The military would be responsible for preventing any attacks after the terrorists would be released and given ten thousand dollars along with a forty-eight hour grace period during which they would not be tracked by anyone. Continue reading
Tags: critical thinking, Junior Fellowship, Mentoring, Steve Jobs, TED Talks, The Onion
A few weeks ago, I started my work as a Sandbox fellow at the Hubli office of Agastya International Foundation. Agastya is a non-governmental organization that works in the education sector and seeks to stimulate creative and critical thinking among children and teachers in rural India with the goal of producing ‘creators, tinkerers and solution-seekers’. Agastya runs one of the largest hands-on science education programs in the world and has reached over 3 million children and 120,000 teachers in India. Through outreach programs such as Science on Wheels (a mobile laboratory program) and Science Fairs, Agastya provides invaluable platforms for children in rural India to engage in activities that help them develop creative, critical-thinking, reasoning and leadership skills. Their mission signifies a clear departure from the conventional techniques of textbook-based rote learning and emphasis on teaching as an activity limited to verbal instruction in classrooms. With an emphasis on transforming learning attitudes from ‘yes’ to ‘why’, ‘looking’ to ‘observing’, ‘passiveness’ to ‘exploring’, ‘textbook-bound’ to ‘hands-on’ and ‘fear’ to ‘confidence’, Agastya’s work is poised to make a significant impact on education, development, and entrepreneurship in rural India where privileges of modern educational resources would likely take a painfully long time to reach. Agastya’s work has already received widespread attention and has been recommended for nationwide replication by the Prime Minister’s National Knowledge Commission.
Two weeks ago, I visited Agastya’s campus in Kuppam, Andra Pradesh to learn about their projects and facilities and to meet with officials who work there. The 20 hours long bus ride from Hubli isn’t something I’d be willing to take again anytime soon, but for this time at least, the trip was completely worth the hassle of the long ride. The scenic Kuppam campus is located in rural Andhra Pradesh near the Karnataka border and spreads over 300 acres. There are huts, stone buildings, herb gardens, outdoor science models and wide paths that crisscross the campus. Apparently, children and teachers come not only from neighboring villages but from all over the country to learn, discover and experiment in the Kuppam campus. It is not only a learning center but also a place to experiment new ideas and projects for Agastya- teachers and other staffs of the campus design and try new science experiments to show children, or build new cost-effective lab equipments, or engage in discussions and observations of how children learn, teach and discuss the best.
Continue reading
Tags: Agastya International, Creative, Education, Kuppam, Mobile Labs, Sandbox Fellow, Science, Students, Teachers
I chose to work in development due to an insatiable curiosity towards people and their life stories. Whenever I go to the field I try to spend as much time as possible with the communities I visit. I’m lucky because I speak Hindi and this invaluably helps my interactions with the locals in India. Even here in Karnataka, where the Deshpande Foundation is active, I can get by with my Hindi, at least in the towns. Sometimes though, curiosity and enthusiasm are not enough to deal with the endless frustrations of this kind of job. Whenever I feel the world around me is hopelessly unfair to the weak and the vulnerable I try to constrain my mind to think on the shortest term possible, day by day, rather than on the long-term. I try to zoom in looking for small victories because, as cliché as it sounds, they actually make your day.
Tags: beneficiaries, development, disability, mobility, wheelchair
When I was in the U.S, one of my favorite parts of driving to work was turning on the radio to NPR. While tuning in, I never felt like I was just listening to news. Rather, it was an experience. When NPR covers a story, they take you into that world. You not only hear the sounds, but you feel what is going on.
As the Media Fellow, my main medium is film, but recently the Deshpande Foundation decided that we should have an audio podcast. Every month in the “Featured Partner” section of the website, we would include this audio podcast that would take our audience into the world of one of our NGO partners. Now, one would think that putting together an audio podcast would be much easier than creating a short video, but in many ways it’s harder. In film, your audience can see what’s going on, but with audio, you have to paint them a picture through sounds. At the beginning of this project, I knew I could capture good sound bites, but the real challenge would be to have the audience feel what is going on in that NGO.
Tags: Agastya International Foundation, Deshpande Foundation, Media Fellow, Mobile Lab, Sandbox
