Chronicles of Social Change Agents
your philanthropy story
the idea behind it was actually
germinated at the imb aluminized summit
called
imbue in december 2015. it started with
a session from kiran mazumla shaw
and azeem premji talking about
philanthropy the art of giving
in the session they did talk about when
you think about philanthropy you think
about the big names you think about they
are saying primary foundation you think
about the bill and melinda gates
foundation
you think about the birla trust but very
rarely do you hear positive stories
about common people like you and i who
can be social heroes
and they said that there is a lack of
platform that kind of covers those kind
of positive
stories that can be heard to people to
inspire them to do more
that’s where the idea germinated shivo
koteshwar and i
were attending that session we stepped
out of the ballroom where
the you know the event was being held
and
behind a paper napkin the idea of your
philanthropy story actually germinated
and you know it’s been a great journey
so far we’ve heard some
really inspiring stories people who’ve
created change and who’ve impacted lives
in many ways
but of all of this i think the first
story is really very close to my heart
because i remember i did go and speak to
guru prasad
of guru and jana it’s just it’s a large
ca form
in fact they work with some of the
coolest and the biggest startups in
bangalore i’m sure a lot of you all in
the audience will be working with them
soon if
you know if you already don’t have uh
any relationship with them
in that in that meeting guru said a few
things which really struck my heart and
you know and struck the code in my heart
and i felt uh you know this was an
organization that that i really
was happy that i would start the entire
platform with
he said they were structured guru and
jenna as a social enterprise
he spoke to me about their internship
program they received about 1500
applications for an internship program
every year
they select 20. the 10 of them are
tire one um you know top ranking
students who are cas you know people who
are studying for c
and who are looking to intern with them
and the other 10
are from tire to tire 3 or rural
background
but below average students the idea is
to create a platform
where you can get people with you know
who have and have nots and give them a
platform to
actually an equal platform for as a
stepping stone for them to be better
in my mind that was wonderful how many
people do you see
uh or organizations do you see people
doing this
the second story uh you know in that
same interview which
which really moved me was about ram the
receptionist he’s visually impaired
i remember the first day when i went
there i was introduced to him
and i was surprised that you know he had
a great photographic memory
he knew numbers by heart he knew
people’s names he knew which
organization
but what really surprised me was when i
went back
to meet guru to take a couple of
pictures
you know he recognized me by just
hearing my voice and apparently he does
that
um you know regularly by either the
perfume that somebody wears or just by
listening to their voice and that blew
me away
and i was thinking if one person can do
so much
of a difference can you imagine how many
more people are there
that you know we haven’t covered and we
haven’t heard the stories
um we quickly realized after about four
or five interviews that
you know for us to sustain the quality
of interviews that we need
we really need a strong advisory team
without which we wouldn’t be really
able to make the justice or create the
impact that we were looking for so we
have a very core
advisory team in place who help us
identify people
whom we can go and reach out to and
cover as well as wet through the entire
process of
you know figuring out which could be new
areas so in this process we’ve also
introduced
a youth social model where we are
looking at
you know young students who are actually
giving back to society as well
fast forward a few years and we had done
multiple interviews
in the area of education we met this
really amazing extraordinary person
called mr shuklabos
who is the founder for the parikrama
foundation and
you know she does a lot of work with the
slum children in bangalore
and she was speaking about how you can
go back and enhance the quality of life
for a child
by ensuring that you are educating this
child and
once you educate the child it can have
impact at multiple levels
right through enhancing your hygiene
levels working through
you know ensuring that your younger
siblings are also
then wanting to learn or you know
inculcating a joy of learning
as well as looking to see how you can
actually uh
look at the standard of life itself at
home because you are being educated a
lot of the alum and i actually come back
and contribute back and they become
great role models for
these younger children a lot of this
actually stayed back in my mind
and that’s what really shaped our
journey going forward because we were
then
thinking about what can we do to
actually bring about further impact
this led to our setting up the pelaku
trust bellocum canada main slide
the first of the project in balakoo
trust is running a supplemental
supplementary education program
in a small place called hangarapura it’s
about 120 kilometers from bangalore
we have 108 students who are part of
this program
and we do bi-monthly sub you know
classes in the area of steam
which is science technology engineering
arts and mathematics
i still remember how this whole
conversation started i walked up to
shiva and i said i think shiva we have
to go back to be doing something back
with the students to really create that
impact in brutal children
he had just then set up an
infrastructure in his farm in
hangarapura
and he said smitha if you think you want
to go ahead and you said over the
weekends
feel free i still remember my father
always felt that change had to come from
within and you can’t
expect it to be anywhere outside so
that’s where i started
you know a srinivasan spoken english
program working with students
we said we have to take the plan some
time so we did the
you know announcement in the classes and
bang on day one
on the first class i still remember we
had 28 students
i was thrilled because i said this is a
experiment that we’re looking to run and
i had 28 students that i could really
work with
the students had fun because we had kind
of gamified and we had an engaging day
one
um and the second week i had close to
about
46 students um you know and i was
extremely thrilled and i said wow i mean
you know we are doing something right
here which is why the children want to
be coming back and working
with us and learning from with us um
they class three
i go in and i wait for an r and i have
zero students
and i’m disappointed and i said
something’s gone wrong and then suddenly
i hear a child saying
can you come and meet with the village
council miss i said okay
and uh you know both of us walked past
walked by and we went to the village
council
and there i heard that somebody had gone
back and spread rumors that we were out
there we were no good we were out there
to actually
you know steal heart and kidney and eyes
of all of these students by drugging
them
and that’s why we were doing this and i
was appalled and i said
i was doing this because i wanted to
create an impact i sat down
shiva and i then you know spoke about
the larger vision what did what is it
that we wanted to do
the different styles that we want to
adopt with teaching
and i was pleasantly surprised that the
villages actually have
a great pta system we had four parents
who kind of volunteered
at least for the first two classes to
come and sit through our sessions
we said they are more than welcome to
come for the classes there’s only
one condition that we had that the
teacher the student
and the teacher can only be inside the
classroom
the parent had to be waiting outside and
there was a place for them to be seated
they would eat the same breakfast and
they would eat the same lunch that we
were providing for the students class
one happened class two
and uh when i went to pick up the
students for class three i asked the
parent that i typically talked to
uh about the you know folks who are the
parents who would be actually coming and
sitting in the class that day
and he immediately looked at me and he
said
sorry miss that even we doubted you we
are
extremely apologetic i think the
students are really learning
um they seem to be spending lot more
better time
or being better employed and i think
it’s a lot more safer that they are with
you in your classroom
than for them to be roaming around the
fields or roaming around the village so
they were very happy and that was a
great hurdle to get by
i think what we’ve also done over the
last three years is to
look at what can we do to actually make
lifelong learners
out of and inculcate the joy of learning
with our students
and we’ve done that with a great
volunteer network uh who are
really skilled and specialist in their
area that they come and they engage with
us
it’s been three years and you know
fundamentally we just measure on one
which is are our children happy are they
happy to come to a class
are they happy attending the class and
are they happy when they’re going back
from class
is it anything that we are doing here
does it result in any form of happiness
to the child
and i think equally important is how
happy are my volunteers because if they
aren’t happy the quality of
education or the quality of engagement
that we will have
with the with the child will dip a
byproduct of
all of this is also that we’ve seen the
hygiene levels go up
over the last three years we’ve ensured
that the children are washing their
hands they’re clean when they come to
the classroom
so generally the hygiene levels have
gone up second because we’ve inculcated
the joy of learning in them
the school dropout rates have also
reduced third is
actually we’ve created a uniform
platform or
you know created a a scenario where the
haves and the have nots economically
are also being treated the same so they
all sit in the same classroom they all
sit next to each other when they have
their meals they have to all wash their
plates
after they’re done eating and we’ve kind
of taken off those biases about you know
especially around the
economic barriers or parity that used to
exist in the village
what we’ve been also able to do is uh
you know do away with the biases that
come
either with disfigurement or disability
in the classroom
uh we have a girl her name is meenakshi
she has a fairly large burn mark on her
face
um there was a lot of buyers a lot of
the children did not want to be sitting
next to her in a classroom
and she was always left alone so i
watched this for a couple of classes and
then i
decided that one way to do this is to
bring about some form of intervention
i gamified the next few classes what i
did tell is
in my english class i was going to you
know go back and play damsharats
mind the word or the sentence that we
were going to be learning over
uh you know that next few classes uh
before i did that what i did do
observe was meenakshi was very good at
picking up people’s expressions
she could go back she could express
herself back really well
and she could also mine back so i i got
her to be my primary partner and told
her that
whichever group minds this and gets the
line right
they get a special price quickly the
class caught on that you know meenakshi
is an asset to have
and all of them were really clamoring to
have her as part of their teams
as the classes went long over the next
few classes
and what was interesting is what started
as
some kind of intervention today there is
natural acceptance to actually have
meenakshi sit with them
you know they ensure that they wait for
her they ensure they help us into the
transport
vehicle they ensure that you know she is
fine i think
that for me is a larger impact that
we’ve been able to bring about
bellago is looking to do three key
projects
in 2020 project number one is nyanakone
the idea is to how can we give access to
the kids the youth as well as the adults
in remote areas access to a computer
this
then expands and gives them access to
knowledge that is outside of the remote
setup
uh nyanakone will comprise of a small
you know construction which will be
perfect you know which will be
completely sustainable
and which will be supported by renewable
energy in terms of
solar panels and ultra capacitor
batteries
and uh you know it will comprise of very
simple peripherals like a computer
a mouse and a keypad and a small printer
a local nearby uh kiosk or you know
store will actually manage the
day-to-day management or operations for
the yanakuni
and students can either take printouts
or they could have meter time
30 minutes to an hour long meter time to
come and use the computer
because predominantly research has shown
that they have
very little or very limited access to a
computer in these remote areas
the second project that we’re looking to
do is uh 100 kids and 100 smiles
in in bangalore we do see that a lot of
the areas have a lot of construction
work and
they which in turn means a lot of
children uh one such case is in
uh bangalore north in hibal it’s an
upcoming area there is
a lot of construction that is going on
right now and which also means a lot of
children who are
there in that area and who either go to
a private school or a government school
and the view was how could we then give
them
an a full uh well-balanced meal
extremely nutritious
but you can’t just feed the stomach
right you need to enrich the mind as
well
so we’ve identified 500 key
life skills that we can go back and
train this is again through
the vast network that belco has
developed over the last few years
and getting them to in turn work with
these children
it’ll be a 30-45 minute session where
there’ll be a volunteer talking to the
students about
or the children about a life skill and
then they will should be followed by a
meal
the third program that we’re doing is
called the beluko learning expedition
it is to say a big thank you to the
public servants
um or the public service um
you know professionals who are actually
serving us it could be people from the
police department
like constables children or it could be
people from the fire department
or it could be the bbmp barakah makes
children
whom we want to be going back and
working with in in hibal and in
bangalore
uh the idea is uh you know these kids
already go to a government or a private
school
can we then take them on a learning trip
um ensure that you know they
are served with a nutritious meal and in
the process they learn by
seeing something or by experience
something and
for example if you want to learn about
fishes can we take them to an aquarium
and can they see this aquarium and can
they see the fishes and can they learn
more
these are the three projects and we’re
looking to launch all of these
uh in 2020 i’ve always felt that
change can’t be external it needs to be
internal to the
person and each of us can actually come
back and be that change that we’re
looking for
inspire people to come back and give
back i still remember
after the you know after a few classes
uh a child came running to me right
after class was over and said miss miss
please take this mango it’s really sweet
and i said
why are you giving me this mango um and
he said
miss this is the first mango in my farm
and i want to give it to somebody who’s
you know made a big impact on me and i
want to give it to you i think it’s
about doing the small things
it’s about listening to your instincts
it’s about taking action and i think
each one of you
can be a social hero thank you