Papers done - time for some real blogging!!

Woo! I am done with Ireland! Who knows what the results of all the stress will be but I am just happy its over. I am celebrating saying a final "goodbye" to Ireland (the bad part) with a Facebook photo album commemorating our "goodbye" to the good part! You can find that here.

This is going to be a lengthy, lengthy deal, as I intend to be explaining a lot in order to give a good picture of my life here. So, I'll be splitting it up into parts and posting them over the course of this week.

PART ONE

Key terms for beginners:

NGO - Non-Governmental Organization. "NGO" can be used to describe a lot of things, but usually it is used to describe an aid agency that, as the title implies, is independent and not affiliated with a national government. Some famous examples? Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch. They can be action-based, research-based, or publicity based. Basically they can do anything.

The Sandbox - The region in which the Deshpande Foundation primarily operates in India, essentially the northwestern portion of the state of Karnataka (where the Deshpandes originally hail from)

I figure it's well past time to actually talk a little about what we do here in Hubli at the Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship. So the Deshpande Foundation is a NGO that seeks to foster a spirit of "social entrepreneurship" which basically means entrepreneurship with a conscience, or, from the other side, philanthropy with a brain. For example, taking a small, poor village who make their living off of craftsmanship. The village lies in a part of the world where they are blessed with a specific breed of sheep, who in turn are blessed with a very desirable type of wool. The village people have long been able to use the wool to make beautiful bags and clothes, however the only people they can sell it too are the people who know about the village, as there is little technology and no one in the village has extensive education or knowledge of marketing. This means they are not making enough money to sustain their craft, and the village heritage and economy is threatened because they start having to raise other livestock, or mix the breeds of their sheep for more production of lesser-quality raw materials for sale.

How does "social entrepreneurship" apply? An NGO goes in, and instead of just recognizing the poverty in the village, recognizes the potential. Instead of just feeding money into the village as a form of aid, the NGO uses their resources and training to create a network for the village crafts. They scale up the production by providing training for the villagers in more efficient methods (looms, for example) and they scale up demand by marketing the materials nationally and even internationally at such venues as fair trade shows and the like. Within a relatively short amount of time, they have created a sustainable economy for the village and a more-than-sufficient source of revenue. In this way, they have given the villagers back their independence while allowing them to maintain their traditional livelihood, and have done so in a way that the NGO is able to easily recoup their expenses in the process. This is just one example - there are a great many good examples of this just within the Sandbox region.

That's what the Deshpande Foundation does in a nutshell - usually instead of getting involved in a particular charity case, they will instead get involved in an NGO, providing training and resources so that the NGO can scale up their project or enterprise, become more self-reliant and less reliant on external resources such as donations. This allows the NGO to have a wider impact while becoming more and more self-sustaining.

The Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship, during Development Dialogue 2010

So what do I do?? Well, I work at the Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship (DCSE) which is the hub of the Deshpande Foundation's activities in India (they are primarily based out of Boston). DF sponsors numerable fellowship programs. The two main ones are: the Sandbox Fellows, who are usually American young professionals with training or background in some area of development studies who come to the Sandbox to work for a particular NGO, and you have the Deshpande Fellows, who are Indian young professionals from various places and fields around Karnataka who come here for a 6-7 month residential training program in the ways of social entrepreneurship. The point of the program is to give them the skills to succeed and make the impact that they want to make, and then some. The program is competitive and generally the graduated Fellows go on to a wide array of jobs and other opportunities.

When they arrive at DCSE, the Deshpande Fellows are put through an intensive pre-training program to make sure that they all have the skills they need to continue on with the remainder of the program, which is a combination of specialized classes meant to make them better thinkers and innovators, and more effective workers and leaders. Because of the variety of backgrounds represented by the DF Fellows, many of them are in situations where they have only rarely had to speak English, or where they have never in their lives had to use a computer. The purpose of the pre-training is to provide them with the tools they need to get started: fluency in English and the basics of IT.

I am the English instructor for this batch of DF Fellows (Cohort IV). The group of 30 or so Fellows is split into 2 groups, both of which I meet with for at least 3 hours per day, from 9-12 and from 2-5. Usually I arrive at the DCSE before 8:30 am and leave after 6 pm, only to go home and work on correcting assignments and preparing lesson plans. This basically means I'm working...all the time. However although it is hard on me, it is hard on them too, and I find myself wanting to give as much of myself as possible to them because I respect all of them to the highest degree - every one of them is inspirational and amazing in their own way. I've said this before, but I consider it a huge privilege to be working with them at all.

Me with a few of my Fellows (left to right: Shalini, Avinash, Laxmi) during Development Dialogue

Of course, giving as much as I've been giving (as I have been warned by my colleagues) means that I might burn out. The limited amounts of sleeping and eating that I've been doing may have had something to do with the fact that I've been sick...pretty much since I've been here.

But now after a week of not having to teach classes and having to be pretty much bed-ridden I am rested, feeling healthy, and ready to go again! Bring it on! Alas, while this week of Development Dialogue was restful for me, it was quite the opposite for the Fellows, so we'll see how all of them due with class starting up again tomorrow.

Stay tuned for my (limited due to illness) accounts of Development Dialogue (discussed briefly in a previous post), and for news of my first trip outside of Hubli!