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Take Mridula Bajaj, the former Executive Director of Mobile Creches<\/a>, who dedicated 22 years of her life to helping impoverished children of construction workers get the care they need to thrive while their parents do manual labor. There are 160 million children under the age of 6 in India. Sixty million of them live in poverty, and those with families often don’t get the care they need because mothers can go back to work as early as 10 days after giving birth. Mobile Creches trains child care providers and has centers around India.<\/p>\n Mridula Bajaj spoke to us about goal setting — detailing the decisions she made to restructure and focus the organization to ultimately improve performance. Her presentation left me emotional — the issues she’s spent her life tackling are just so brutal and immense — and yet, the tenents of leadership needed to move the agenda forward are universal and immediately applicable to the work I’m doing at home now and would eventually like to expand.<\/p>\n No matter what you’re working on:<\/p>\n I was fascinated by the organization’s failure in using social media successfully, even though they made a good effort.\u00a0 That’s because their program people didn’t share the stories the could so easily talk about onsite.\u00a0 Something about formalizing them to share online was a deterrent — and I face the same issue with our program people literally every work day.<\/p>\n Interestingly, Mobile Creches is primarily funded internationally partly because the community it serves, and the Indian community in general, doesn’t see the issue of early childhood care as a primary concern.<\/p>\n After lunch, we went on our first site visit. We’ve been encouraged to view these as “sensing visits” opening up all of our senses to take in as much as possible.<\/p>\n I went with the group to the National Skills Development Corporation<\/a> (NSDC) — a public (government) – private partnership to train workers based on need and international standards of best practice to integrate more people into the formal Indian economy and to participate in international exchange programs.<\/p>\n The building was beautiful and the modern office had an 1871 vibe — very hip. The organization prides itself on hiring the nations top young talent educated all over the world — with the goal of elevating India.<\/p>\n NSDC has 40 sector skill councils to build various online occupational training modules, and also to focus on groups of people in need — including people with disabilities. I will do a whole post on this later — I need to unpack it a bit — but in short, I was impressed by\u00a0 NSDC’s grant system to invest in India long-term and how it’s goals are evolving based on what the programs themselves are uncovering.<\/p>\n For example, a system of mobile radios has been created to connect trainees who were rural workers and are now adapting to the new jobs they’ve trained for in the city. Social media at its best!<\/p>\n We discussed how NSCD is driven by the concept of working toward opportunity rather than being equal in poverty and how the organizational goals and grant and program approaches vary based on different target audiences — the 20% below the poverty line, the 50% who are above the poverty line now but have memories of living below it, and 30% middle class.<\/p>\n We were then off to Dilli Haat — a non-profit on reclaimed sewer land where artisans from around the country rotate through to sell their wares.\u00a0 The space is beautiful! And here you can be assured your money is going directly to the artisan not to a middle-man.\u00a0 My bargaining skills are improving!<\/p>\n Finally, we finished the day with dinner on the lovely back patio at the Lalit Hotel, where we celebrated our fellow fellow’s birthday.\u00a0 Happy Birthday Hilesh! There was a beautiful Indian wedding at the hotel too — the colors and clothing was spectacular!<\/p>\n Geo and I have spent an enjoyable morning decompressing and reflecting on this extraordinary experience so far.\u00a0 Accessibility for today’s site visit to Protsahan were a tad too complex to manage, so I’ll meet up with the group at lunch for class on negotiation and tonight we dine at the home of Jeffrey Sexton, Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs, US Embassy. More adventures to come!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" India is a complicated place — a mix of cultures, religions, and social classes. We got a taste yesterday of how nonprofits and the government navigate them to begin addressing the needs of the people. As monumental as the need is, extraordinary outreach is being done. Take Mridula Bajaj, the former Executive Director of … Continue reading “The complexities of India”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trip"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9HGHz-2C","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions\/179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetandgeorge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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