Glimpses from India, a Mini-Report on CLP Winter Programming

Wow.

The Child Leader Project 2009-2010 Winter Program was an incredible success. I type this with confidence and a giddy grin. By “success” I mean that CLP youth leaders were excited, talkative, thoughtful, challenging and engaging as teachers and students. Programs embodied CLP values by the ways in which they were dialogical (or open in the ways in which people spoke more freely from their experience, without a need to prove, convince, or defend one’s ideas, feelings or experiences) as well as experiential, requiring students to act out or experience the topics and ideas discussed in the CLP classroom. CLP Winter Program was also a success in the ways it deepened our roots in India and making a home, while also “branching out” in a serendipitous network with similar-minded organizations in and around our home, Pondicherry. Upon my return from India and my first day back at the “day job” in California, colleagues said I looked even more excited and refreshed—it’s all because of this month-long experience.

CLP Programs

CLP hosted programs with two of our different partners this winter, Vidiyal Matriculation Higher Secondary School (VMHSS) near Trichy in central Tamil Nadu as well as Anbhagam International Education and Development Center (Anbhagam) in the capital city of Chennai, Tamil Nadu. These two organizations serve very different populations of youth, requiring the organizations and CLP to be creative in developing programming that would meet their specific needs.

Vidiyal is CLP’s first partner, making this Winter Program their fourth CLP experience and completing their second year of programming! Over 46 CLP students are present at Vidiyal ranging from 8th to 12th standard students. Students who are currently in 10th and 12th standard (similar to the USA “grade” system) are currently focused on preparing for their government-mandated testing and were only able to participate in a closing ceremony. The remaining students (8th, 9th and 11th) were participants for the three-day program.



This winter program at Vidiyal was titled “VISION 2020 in 2010” and utilized the writings of former Indian president, APJ Abdul Kalam as a springboard for discussions and expressions of “community development.” CLP students had selected APJ’s Vision 2020 as a possible topic of interest during our 2009 Summer Program, mindful that APJ’s vision was specifically directed at empowering younger generations and empowering the Indian community towards development. Ultimately, however, APJ argues that India is a “highly developed country in an advanced state of decay.” This statement would turn out to be particularly powerful for students at Vidiyal—in a before survey provided at the beginning of the program, all students stated that India was a “developing country.” In a post-survey, all students stated that India was a “developed country” with social issues that could be remedied by its own people.

Following a group reading of an abridged version of APJ’s “Vision 2020” speech, students returned to their homes and dormitories with a list we called “Points of Development.” This list included concerns related to a wide range of topics, including agriculture, education, corruption, peace and security, trade, environmental degradation and the status of women. The goal of the assignment was to engage the idea of “development” in our own lives— for example, what does “development” look like in our village or in our schools? Students returned the next day with short stories and comments about different points and we found topics and stories that overlapped.

The places of overlap became our “problems” in the CLP version of Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed.” In this drama, we used stories and situations from our own lives (i.e. concerns about dowry or women’s rights post-marriage, police corruption and child abuse in schools) to act out new solutions. Students performed as actors in the play and would repeat the play, creating new solutions to the problem with each new performance. Ultimately, students created their own “situations” and performed these for 8th standard students at the end of the leadership program.

The experience of performing and improvising new roles and responses was an incredibly new experience for students. One girl, Suhasini performed in the role of the young groom’s father and expressed her total joy at the power she felt in her role. The young man that played the future bride said he felt “negative” describing that he had “never had to be a girl before.” In the performance on police corruption, one student with the ambition of becoming a police officer stood and described how he thinks police could behave differently in the future as students questioned him about the actors in the play. Student performances included issues from caste discrimination in families and friendships to child abuse and public health awareness.

Our feedback from this program reveals the power of this sort of community experience. One 8th standard student describes her experience: “First of all I want to thank Samantha Akka (sister) and Amala Akka. Because I am not so happy in my home or in my class. But I am so happy to attend the CLP and clean the community garden. For this class I hope of having some talent. I attend CLP I have some confidence. I like the games then homework. I like drama that we are acting. I am so fun, happy and I have no words to thank you.” When it was announced we would like to create a “CLP Council” of individuals at the school to help make some guiding decisions about the work we would do together in the future, all the students submitted a statement of interest. We are so happy for the community that we are all building together at Vidiyal.

Our second, main program was with Anbhagam ICEDC. Anbhagam serves the street and slum communities in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Students from these communities are provided daily tuition and program support from Anbhagam’s three staff members. Anbhagam and CLP come together to provide extra programs, trainings and experiences that inspire and support students in their lives (for the present and the future). This program was focused on the topic of making changes in our lives as it relates to education. We discussed the changes that made a difference in our past and how those changes will also happen in our future. Higher education was described as one of many tools for making a difference in our future.

To take the idea of higher education and make it a “reality,” John Bosco (Director of Anbhagam) and staff collaborated with CLP to take students to a local college, Loyola College, in Chennai. Bosco is an alumni of Loyola College and connected with his previous colleagues and professors to create a memorable experience for the students.


Twenty-six Anbhagam students from the Little Mount community came to Loyola College for an exploration of Visual Communications and college student life. They had tutorials of filming and lighting, photo shop and graphics as well as a full tour of the campus with a lunch in the student canteen. To top it off, Anbhagam and CLP created bright yellow t-shirts for each student that said “Child is not a bucket—child is a fire.” Students were stopped by professors and staff and questioned about the meaning of the t-shirt. Students replied that it meant “we have our own dreams!” No participating student had ever been to a college campus before, nor had any of them had family that went to college. This was an incredible first experience for this particular youth community.

The following day, Anbhagam students participated in a short debrief about the program from the previous day, as well as led in a guided meditation by a special guest visitor (Vijay Mohan) on visioning their futures and the changes they want to make in their own lives.

(I'm also in the process of building Anbhagam a website: www.anbhagam.blogspot.com!)

Exciting Opportunities for the Future
First of all, congratulations to our five matriculating students from Vidiyal. We look forward to giving them college scholarships this summer (four featured below)!




CLP has incredible opportunities for the summer. We are now connected with Baby Sarah’s Home, an orphanage for orphaned and mentally and physically differently-abled children and youth. Baby Sarah’s has over 108 children in its home and is led by a young and enthusiastic 27-year-old man named Karthik. Karthik and I met during an International Conference on Autism that we both attended at Pondicherry University in December 2009.

We are also in collaboration with an organization, CHILD (Child Helpage in Long Duration) located in Pondicherry. This organization provides tuition classes, vocational training and women’s Self-Help Groups for a village community in-between Pondicherry and Auroville. The leaders of CHILD are eager to create programs with social change/social justice focus for the children in their area in the summer.

While both of these new possibilities root us even more firmly in Pondicherry, we would like to see collaboration and sharing across Tamil Nadu and Chennai. One of our goals for summer is a “CLP Convergence” of sorts in which all of our partners will have an opportunity to meet, dialogue and collaborate. We would also like to bring our students from across Tamil Nadu to do a similar activity, making this convergence and conference an annual community-event that CLP sponsors. Many of our partners have described that collaborative or dialogue-based meetings are less common as there are many issues related to sharing practices or staff across organizations (i.e. people are very afraid to lose funding or staff of they share too much information about their work). Perhaps CLP and CLP partners can create a new paradigm of community-based organizations in the areas we all work.

Overall, this winter was an incredible opportunity for collaboration and deepening of our relationships with our partners, new and old. A more extensive report of our activities will be available from our website in the next couple of weeks. This will more clearly outline our work, as well as include the feedback from our students.

More importantly, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our staff and partners in India, our Board of Directors and our donors and supporters in the USA. CLP is not possible without an incredible community of people, seen and unseen, that have given their financial, spiritual and emotional resources to see this organization take off. From the deepest place in my heart, I can not express the gratitude I have for the support those around us have given to see this vision continue.

And with that, happy new year! We look forward to “visioning” our future with you!

CNN Local Interview

Filmed June 2009, prior to the CLP Summer 2009 Programs.

The Best Measurement: Measure in Love, Measure in Life.

21 November 2009

As a young girl, my family took me to the Broadway opening of “RENT” three different times. RENT, a now-cult-classic, is a musical performance that dynamically explores topics of sexuality, gender, disease, art and activism at the turn of the millennium in New York. The hit song, “Seasons of Love,” was a song my mother and I would sing from a tape she had recorded and played ad nauseum in her glaringly red, Pontiac Firebird. The chorus went like this:

“525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear.
525,600 minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.
In 525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year in the life?
How about love? How about love?
How about love? Measure in love.
Seasons of love.”

Measurement is ever-present in the work we do. As we work our way through November, two CLP Board Members, Rachel Meeker and Sydney Craft, are in the throes of Clinton Global Initiative University applications. CLP has been represented at CGIU the passed two years (2008 a nd 2009) with a special invitation to attend this Spring (2010). CGIU is a non-partisan effort developed by former President Clinton in 2005 as a call to action for college students and universities to tackle global problems with collaborative and innovative solutions. CLP was awarded on-stage in 2009 as an “exemplary approach to addressing a specific global challenge.” This was followed by our being awarded $4,000 by the Pat Tillman Foundation as an Outstanding Commitment Award.

One key question in a CGIU application is the organization's quantitative, measurable benchmarks that demonstrate its reach and impact. How do you measure your year? How does the organization prove its effectiveness? How many bed-nets were given? Loans? Scholarships? Computers? How many students enrolled? How many students retained? How much money donated?

In my “day job” as Coordinator of Undergraduate Research at the University of California, Riverside, I recognize the importance of benchmarks, assessments and analysis in determining whether or not we have reached our desired learning outcomes and goals. My office sits squarely next door to the Office of Institutional Research, housing a determined Sociologist that pumps out incredible amounts of information as to the success of our student population. By the sounds of her typing and printing alone, I am well aware of the mass of information and work required to have quantified, statistic information about the retention and graduation rates of university students and the “success” of the university, no matter how narrow that may be defined.

However, CLP does not strive to model itself after the public university system. Nor does it measure its success in the number of “things” re-distributed across the world or in our local community. If a CLP student dropped out of CLP or did not matriculate into higher education, I know we would not have “failed.” If a book club is attended by three people or ten people, we would not have failed. If two scholarships are given or twenty scholarships are given, we would not have failed. If the organization no longer exists one year from now, CLP would not have failed-- the purpose is not to protect the organization, the purpose is to use the organization as one of an infinite number of tools by which we come together collectively to make change.

CLP “goals” are simple: we create spaces where we become fully human, where we engage oppression, where we reflect on the fragmentation resulting from that oppression and where we take action to address it or bring other people into awareness of it.

So, how shall we measure our year? I think it is represented in the number of conversations we had; the number of hearts broken open in tenderness or awareness; the people who feel more conscious of their individual lives and their lives in relationship to others; those who are mindful of the world and their power in the world; those that feel capable of contributing their piece to life.

We shall be measured by the number of organizations and people that led us in a better direction; the ways we became more conscious of our work; the scholarships given to students who are excited to go to wherever they are going; the parents involved; the obstacles-turned-opportunities; the strangers-turned-board-members who are excited to add their piece to the puzzle; the board-members-turned-strangers who have grasped their own deeper calling and feel ready to plunge into the unknown with it based on the learning they experienced in CLP. As said by civil rights leader Rev. Howard Thurman, “Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive... then go do it. Because what the world needs are people that have come alive.”

This is not an organization of numbers-- this is an organization for the pursuit and engagement of life. Let us hold ourselves to no other standard than the ways we bring life, engage life and discover life within ourselves and our global community.

In gratitude for your support,
Samantha

UCR Magazine: CLP and Samantha Featured

CLP Featured in UCR Magazine:
http://magazine.ucr.edu/1009/default.asp?tpgid=47251125&sn=112009

Article Excerpt:

"Living the Promise"

Samantha Wilson, who graduated from UC Riverside in June with a bachelor’s degree in global studies, is now coordinating a new brand of university-fueled volunteerism.

In the fall quarter, UCR started a pilot program connecting undergraduates with community groups to do needed research and provide other services. Faculty mentors will work with the students.

As the new coordinator for undergraduate research in the community, Wilson said she is “seeking out opportunities for students to connect to community organizations and entities to find ways that their research, their participation or their presence works for social service or social change, and benefits the community in a new way. … I look forward to mentoring students to organize and develop power with the community through collaborative action and research.”

Although Wilson is a new graduate, she is hardly new to community service. While a UCR junior she founded a nonprofit called Child Leader Project, working to encourage education and leadership globally.

“I wrote a proposal to do a values-based leadership program at a school run by a micro-finance institution in South India and received $10,000 from the Donald A. Strauss Public Service Scholarship Foundation,” she wrote recently from India. “It began at one school in South India, and has now spread in a rather organic way to three different youth communities across the state of Tamil Nadu. By the end of this summer, we will have approximately 85 students in our programs in India.”

The nonprofit also has connections at UC Riverside and at two area high schools in Riverside and the Jurupa area. “We want youth in the U.S.A. and India to expand education as a lifelong and visionary process of creativity, compassion, exploration, discovery and collaboration,” Wilson said.

Her goals for Child Leader Project: “To bring people together and make a difference in the way we operate as a society, as communities, as schools, families, friends or individuals. We want to re-imagine our world, not simply duplicate it, its injustices, its distractions or its preoccupations within the organization. Therefore, our goal is not money and a killer resume; our goal is social change.”

A team of UCR volunteers went to India in 2008 and taught Indian students about the opportunities of higher education along with other leadership values. “All volunteers for CLP pay to go to India on their own dime — and work very hard when they arrive,” Wilson said. “CLP is far from a vacation: late nights on public buses traveling to and from field sites, all-day programming with high school students, language barriers, heat, mosquitoes. However, the sorts of people that come on a CLP trip are really incredible people — I’d confidently say they are visionary and these sorts of challenges are more like quirky joys to them.”

She has spent summer 2009 on her third trip to India. Two high school exchange students, one from Riverside and one from Jurupa, have also visited. Wilson hopes to leave a permanent program in place, in which Indians teach other Indians. “Children, youth, young adults, adults — people everywhere are aching for meaning and connection,” she wrote from India. “This is what CLP strives to create: a space where we collaborate, create, and connect.

“Although I have graduated as a student, this cycle has not changed. I am still carrying around books and notes and a laptop, still e-mailing professors, still revising and changing what seems to be a lifelong thesis on these ideas,” she wrote. “And I think UCR will be a hotspot for these sorts of things in the future — hopefully the new office for research in the community will be the gathering place for that sort of creative action.”

Leaving Monday... Reading List for the Summer!

I'm leaving for India on Monday. Unfortunately, in the midst of preparing for departure, I've managed to become ill with "Strep Throat." Nevertheless, I've also had the opportunity to prepare my reading list and make a calendar of arrivals and departures for our team of volunteers.

(1) "Yes Means YES! Vision of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape" by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti- Essays on rape and women's sexuality. I have been given a grant by the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation for the development of a creative work on conversations about women and organizing in India. These themes and topics of power and consent and sexuality will be useful fuel for the mental fire.

(2)"The Color of Freedom" by Laura Coppo, an oral biography outlining the lives of two Tamil Nadu social activist-revolutionaries, S. Jagannathan and Krishnammal Jagannathan during the time of Mahatma Gandhi and Indian independence.

(3) "Education for Critical Consciousness" and "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire. CLP grounds a lot of its operations in Freire's writings on liberating education and the power of reflection and action.

(4) "Deschooling our Lives" edited by Matt Hern provides examples of alternatives to traditional schooling, which may unlock some creative thinking for CLP activities and pedagogies. Thanks to my mentor, Kat Norman, for lending this one (and the next one) to me!

(5) "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Gatto also provides a critical examination of the public school system, the banking system of education, and the connections between the industrialized workforce and the crippling of creativity, enthusiasm, and liberation within public education systems.

(6) "The Revolution will not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex" edited by Incite!Women of Color Against Violence. This one is critical of traditional organizing and organizational development in "capitalist America." Thanks to Patrick for the recommendation! I just got it in the mail today-- right on time!

Other possibilities...
- bell hooks, "Teaching to Transgress"
- A biography of Che Guevara, "A Revolutionary Life"
- "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"
- "AIDS Sutra"

Moving is Discovering!-- June 21, 2009

Moving is a process of discovery-- I've been finding old notes, photographs, yearbooks, dried flowers, buttons, nails, pens and folders of overly-detailed class notes from four years of undergraduate education.

I've also found a lot of CLP notes, from India to California. Some from plane rides in between the two. Some cryptic, some anthropological, some poetic.

Some without titles. Like this one, scribbled across three sheets, ripped out and attached to a list of "Social Service Activities" compiled by the Lights of India in Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu in August 2008...

-----------------------
Untitled, Undated Field Notes (India, August 2008)

Why do we do it? Where? How? Purpose.
Marriage moment: Why don't you work locally? Why do we have to choose?
What are you doing with your life?
I'm unifying mind and action.

[Thinking Florida.]
--> Fantasy world.
--> Letter from God.
--> As I looked beneath me, I was making the road.

The weight of that moment-- to do international organizing the right way requires it to consume you. I want to let it consume me. Studying in endless hunger. Read till it becomes you. Stay up late... creating, becoming, developing.

Service, activism, social justice is a full-time job. There is nothing compartmental about it.

Flexibility. Fearlessness.

These are real lives. Where is US where is THEM ?

[A new definition]: Self-activism: a radical confrontation.
(Real social justice is transformation.)

You should get somewhere and feel fearlessly stupid.
--> Humility.
--> FEARLESS HUMILITY.

"You are a CRAZY American girl!"
--> Identity.
--> Foreigner.
--> Female.
--> Unmarried.

[[Enigma]].

Higher education in India... let the market provide?

An interesting article from the Economist:
(http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12749787)

Special Report on India: Creaking, groaning- Dec 11th 2008

"Primary education is a particular worry. It is hard to teach illiterate Indian women basic hygiene. Illiterate men are not equipped for productive employment. Yet in 2001 only 65% of the population was literate, optimistically defined, compared with 90% in China, even though every Indian government for the past two decades has vowed to fix primary education. The current government is no exception. It has increased the overall education budget, but not much. Last year it represented 2.8% of GDP, about half the figure in Kenya.

At least almost all Indian children now go to school: a survey of 16,000 villages carried out last year by ASER, an NGO, put the enrolment rate at 96%. But it also pointed to the appalling quality of education on offer. Half of ten-year-olds could not read to the basic standard expected of six-year-olds. Over 60% could not do simple division. One reason is that, according to a World Bank study, only half of Indian teachers show up to work. Half of Indian children leave school by the age of 14.

Let the market provide?

Or rather, many of them turn to private schools, on which poor Indians spend 2% of their incomes. Many of these are wholly unregulated, but apparently no worse for it. A study of a Hyderabad slum, by James Tooley of Britain’s Newcastle University, found that of 918 schools, 35% were government-run, 23% were private but officially approved, and 37% were informal. The private schools were better. In a standardised test the informal private schools actually came out best, with an average mark of 59.5% in English, compared with 22.4% in the government schools.

Clearly the government should support the grey market in education that its own failings have given rise to. It should make it easier for private schools to get approval. Their teaching materials could then be upgraded and standardised. ASER’s survey also suggests that, with a few sensible steps, big improvements are possible even in state-run schools. By making teachers accountable to local governments, Bihar, India’s most unlettered state, roughly halved its truancy rate last year. A draft law awaiting parliamentary approval would make similar changes across India.

Higher education is another candidate for reform. In the past five years the rate of enrolment in higher education has taken off, from 7% to 13% of young Indians. But the quality of teaching at India’s 348 universities and some 18,000 colleges is generally poor. NASSCOM, the IT industry’s lobby group, reckons that of the 350,000 engineering graduates who emerge each year, mostly from private colleges, 25% are unemployable without extensive further training, and half are just unemployable.

In response to an urgent need, the central government has announced plans for 30 new centrally run institutions. These will not be first-rate. In a recent ranking of the world’s 500 best universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, only two were from India. But the new central institutions will be much better than most Indian public universities, which are run by state governments. In these places the teaching is mostly dreadful, syllabuses are outdated and facilities can be a health hazard.

Many private establishments (which must be affiliated to a public university and cannot be run for profit) suffer the same deficiencies. With demand for higher education outstripping supply, they have little incentive to improve. Cumbersome and politicised regulators add to their woes. Getting approval to open a nursing college in India can take years even though there is a dire shortage of nurses, with only 30% of nursing jobs in rural hospitals filled. Almost the only investors who would submit themselves to this process are the politicians who control it, and indeed many of them own universities.

In a recent paper on India’s higher education, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur call it “the collateral damage of Indian politics”. For corrupt state-level rulers, a tightly regulated university system has many benefits. Politicians, or their lackeys, collect bribes for appointing faculty, admitting students and awarding good grades. They insert their supporters to run the racket. Having destroyed a public university, they then grant themselves permission to open a private one from which, illegally, they milk profits. India’s politicians would clearly be mad to reform this system."