Jai Hind! I am Shyama, the co-founder and director of Friend in need India trust or FIN and I want to share with you our big news. Today, we seek your good wishes and support for a new endeavour that we will be initiating – FIN’s online but not MOOC classes to facilitate the creation of sustainability champions of tomorrow!
Why– you may ask? For that, I need to tell you my story, which is in bits of disconnected pieces, but I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it in the end!
We have one of the most beautiful national anthems of the world and that’s not just my opinion. Many have confirmed the text of the Indian national anthem to be one of the rare ones to not evoke violence and instead speak of the beauty of environmental and cultural diversity (note: read the anthems of USA, European countries, China etc. and you’ll get what I mean).
Yet, our air, water and soil are getting more polluted and there are still unacceptable levels and elements of polarisation and undiminishing verbal and physical violence on grounds of social identity such as gender, ethnicity, religion, sub-religious-group affiliation, occupation and income earned. So unfortunately the reality is much darker than our bright national anthem and the COVID-19 horror must really be taken as a trailer of others to come in the wake of climate change and continuous pollution by citizens and organisations of this planet.
That’s why the mission of Friend in need India trust is to fight these trends and prejudices through action-research, i.e. experimentation with solutions, generating knowledge and sharing knowledge, while making a positive transformative change.
Sounds big coming for a tiny organisation? Well, I tell myself every drop of effort matters and that’s why we must continue. But, I do confess that sometimes I am just so overwhelmed by the magnitude and the diversity of the challenges we are facing that I feel very depressed. That’s why since a few years I have been teaching and training youth more intensively via FIN – to help develop the sustainability leaders of the future. Furthermore, I and our team have been looking and speaking with directors and scholars of various established academic institutions – spending hours and hours – to try to embed our ideas for education in at least one course in their curriculum. However, we have had absolutely no success. So I had given up my dream and had been feeling very sad and powerless.
Then the Corona virus siege happened. All academic activity went online. I taught the Masters course I had designed on ‘Social Entrepreneurship and Public Policy’ in the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) via zoom. In FIN, we had batches of interns coming from different universities in India and abroad (see previous posts) and we were communicating with them via whatsapp and zoom. I have never had such deep conversations with students as under the corona siege (yes, very surprising for me too!) and hearing them and interacting with them – a Eureka moment hit me! I realised that there is a real need for the FIN skilling courses and we could have deep and meaningful teaching and learning experiences even virtually. We could teach our courses even without physically housing them in an academic institution. And that would be even better, because then it would be open to all in India wherever they may be. I started dreaming about education again!
So, I feel so very good today and I wish the very best for you too! We have a small wonderful team and we are going to do our best to create value for students, for the labour market and for the economy and the environment. The FIN courses do not purport to compete with the existing university curricula. Our purpose is to complement them in a very modest but very important way to create sustainability competencies while contributing to closing the glaring skilling gaps.
More soon! Jai Hind!
