Blogging revisited - Events in the past 1 year

It has been more than a year since I wrote my last blog and I don't feel too good about this. The whole idea of writing a blog was to share the updates of our efforts and similar such non-profit efforts and hopefully get in touch with more like minded people. Though the desire of writing was immense, just couldn’t execute it and the easiest excuse is perhaps lack of time!!!

Though the blog succumbed, fortunately our effort hasn’t. We have managed not just to stay afloat for the past 18 odd months but also execute some very interesting projects. Also lots of things happened in the interim which has made the whole exercise that much more challenging. Today’s blog will be more of a warm-up where I shall just touch base upon the activities of the last 18 months and hopefully as my brain cells get warmer to recollect events I shall get on with the details of each activity

With the events of the past 18 months, we now classify our efforts into the following 3 categories:
a) Urban youth program
b) Rural youth program
c) Schools

Brief on each category:
Urban youth program:
This is essentially what we do for the youth of employable age within Mumbai. After the first batch for St.Xavier’s night college students we did one more batch in mid-2007 and very recently followed it up with a 6 session refresher program.

Through these 2 sessions we managed to reach almost 30 odd students. Though the sessions concluded as scheduled, I do not consider this effort successful since we delivered only on half of our intentions (Shall dwell on this in following posts)

The good thing is that we have managed to update and build new content based on our experiences of the last two batches. The content is more or less in shape and hopefully for our next batch (planned somewhere around Oct 2008) we shall come out with cyclostyled copies

Rural Youth program
This has been most satisfying from an effort point of view. We finally managed to conduct a course in Shirpur. The course started in July of 2007 and concluded in December 2007. Through this program we managed to reach 11 participants (10 boys +1 girl).

Especially for this program we designed Audio Video content (though still needs updation). The idea was to build proficiency in spoken English through the medium of mother tongue.

The execution was pretty daunting but we managed to pull this one off. Here again the results were way short of expectations however the shortfall was primarily due to the infrastructure handicaps prevalent in rural areas like Shirpur (will have to dedicate multiple blogs to describe the entire experience and shall do that)

Our rural desires are yet alive and burning and God willing we shall realise it much sooner than later. Rural effort is the most challenging part of the entire jigsaw. Personally it would be a good life lived if we manage to change atleast 1 rural life (though the intention is to change many such lives)

Schools:
During one of my Shirpur visits, I had a chance to chat with some school students at Shirpur Vishwa Mandal. All these school going students were checking if we intend to do any course for their age profile.
Having spent time with the elder youth, one thing was pretty clear – the best method to have an effective long term impact was to start young i.e. Start the entire English training program for our target profile from a young age. For the elder youth, a lot has to be unlearned and lots to be learned. If these guys start young, the unlearning bit could be done away with, additionally whatever they would learn would be correct right from the beginning.

Hence we decided to foray into vernacular medium schools. And so started our first school project at Holy Family High school (Marathi medium) and our audience were Std V students. The whole idea behind the school effort is – We shall be with financially underprivileged students from vernacular medium schools from Std V – Std X and take them through a proper English training program. I firmly believe that if we succeed in doing this, at the end of 6 years (V – X) these students would be able to speak English as good as their private school counterparts.

We have again developed content for this profile and have completed one batch (2007-2008). The results have been encouraging (I can saythis effort has succeeded)

Having finished 1 grade at Holy Family, we shall have 3 batches this year – new Grade V batch in Holy Family, Our last batch students who go into Std VI and we shall replicate the same effort in 1 Municipal school

From a teaching point of view, I enjoy teaching school students the most – its fun (will again write about the entire academic year in much detail in further blogs)

So this has been our journey in the past 18 months but it has not been without mishaps. We were a team of 7 when I wrote my last blog. However with increasing personal and professional commitments the number of working members for almost a year now has been reduced to 2 - 3. Though the work has increased the shoulder space has become narrower – I just hope they don’t sag.

My biggest challenge now more than ever is set up a team. Honestly this has been the driver of me returning to blogging again. Hopefully my return is not short lived and I am able to reach few more people to lend their shoulder space

I shall end today’s blog here.

Insanity must prevail for change to happen!!!

All you guys take good care and do well

Cheers,
Pranil

And the most important thing – We finally have a name, our effort is called “Leap4Word” (the whole exercise of having a name was way too dramatic, can make a good story if we survive and succeed)