By Sarah Abboud
When you hear the term intercultural communication, you may immediately think of communication that takes place between people of different cultures in the geographic sense. I have been participating in intercultural communication ever since I arrived in India. What many of us tend to overlook, however, is that intercultural communication also includes communication between people who may live in the same culture but have socio-economic, religious, experience, and educational differences. I have had the opportunity to see the multiple avenues of intercultural communication in action at Dream A Dream. 
As many of you know, Dream A Dream is a social venture with the mission to empower children from vulnerable backgrounds by teaching them life skills through creative mediums such as sport, art, technology, and mentoring. Working at Dream A Dream has been a very unique experience for me, especially since my previous work was in the for-profit setting. The communication between social entrepreneurs is vastly different from what we see from entrepreneurs in the for-profit world. Naturally, my work with Dream A Dream has exposed me to the unique organizational communication that takes place within a non-profit, in India no less!
During my time at Dream A Dream, I have become accustomed to the unique organizational communication techniques that they have adopted as an organization. Take Kipaya’s and my project, for example. We are working on creating a monitoring system, where Dream A Dream can gather data that reflects how well their program sessions are going across all batches of children. In the time that we have been working here, our project has evolved into something completely different from where it started. In fact, our project became differently nuanced almost weekly for the first four weeks of our time here. This is attributed to meeting with our program director one day, the founder the next…you get the picture. Different individuals pictured our project differently and because we rarely had big meetings with everyone we often got many different perspectives that would move our projects in different directions. It was almost as if it was assumed that everyone would be on the same page, which is usually not the case no matter where you work.
Even though I’m talking about communication between people who have been working together since before Kipaya and I even came into the picture, this is still considered intercultural communication because there are varying levels of experience between each individual at Dream A Dream. For example, some dream staff have advanced degrees or come from different socio-economic backgrounds. This creates an environment where each individual has something different to bring to the table. Now, you throw Kipaya and I into the mix, each with our own unique ways of communicating and you throw everything out of whack! There have been a number of times where I find that language and dialect influence not only my ability to understand a task or someone’s perspective on an area of my project but I know that they too are experiencing difficulty understanding what I am saying. In saying this, learning how to communicate here has been a lesson in and of itself. Thinking about intercultural communication in the context of my personal experiences here also gets me to thinking how intercultural communication influences other individuals like myself who join a social venture in a country whose culture is completely different from their own.
How much is social entrepreneurship affected by the effects of intercultural communication? From my experience at Dream A Dream, I find that intercultural communication between different members of Dream A Dream who have various degrees of experience, education, and the like, greatly influences how they function as an organization. Not to mention the intercultural communication that takes place between Dream A Dream and foreigners who come to India to support their cause, who not only come with their own language and culture but various levels of education, experience, etc.
When I first entered Dream A Dream and was introduced to the individuals who would oversee our project. I expected that the three of them would engage in communication together o a consistent basis, where they would discuss the project they assigned to us, their expectations, and come together to reflect on the work we would do throughout our six week internship. Within two weeks, I realized that this was a terrible assumption to make. When we would come together with our supervisors for meetings, it was then that they talked about our project, not before, as far as I know. At first, I found this frustrating. I felt that our meetings should be used not to review where they stood on the project, but should have been used to talk about the work we had done, whether it was the type of work they were expecting, things that they needed revised, added, etc. I learnt a very valuable lesson as a result of this. Never assume that a group of people will communicate on all projects real-time. I found that it was our job to not only devote our meetings to informing our supervisors of the work we were doing, but to allow them to inform one another of their positions on the project, their understanding of where the project stood at that moment, where it was going, and THEN they could begin providing input for us to put towards our final product. What I was experiencing was simply the way by which Dream A Dream staff communicate, and there is nothing that I was doing that was going to change that. It is already embedded in each individual and the organization itself.
When you approach social entrepreneurship from a communicative lens, the outcomes are truly unique. I know that my experience with intercultural communication in the Indian context varies from my fellow students. Let’s face it; we’re all different people. I am comfortable with that. I guess this is where the communication major in me comes out. I did struggle communicating within an Indian social enterprise and have found that there is much to learn from this experience.
