By Kristen Connors
This week, the GSE students are beginning our second week of work, and already, the students are quite entrenched in their projects. For myself and the three other ladies assigned to work with PremaVidya-SVYM, we spent the first week becoming acquainted with the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM), PremaVidya, and its subproject Project 1947. Before starting our projects, we spent a lot of time talking with Suman our supervisor, and other project directors and personal about the ins and outs of the organization. This was extremely helpful because it created for us, a better picture of the economic, political, and socio-cultural context PremaVidya works within. It’s extremely hard to jump in on a large project like the ones we will be doing without first a thorough knowledge of the goals, history, business plan, organizational structure, etc of any organization. So, in this post, I’ll try to give you the “spark notes” version of about a week’s worth of meetings, tutorials, and lectures.
Navee and Kristen working at PremaVidya on the Video Tutorial
SVYM was started in 1984 by a group of young doctors from Mysore. They discovered that in the tribal areas around Mysore, access to adequate healthcare was abysmal. These doctors decided to build a hospital that would provide quality healthcare services to the people in these tribal villages. Eventually, the founders of SVYM realized that a more holistic approach to health was needed, instead of just a hospital, so initiatives were started in this tribal village to insure that both children and adults had access to education. People had health education classes, as well as primary and secondary, and vocational schooling so that they could have the correct tools to succeed within their village and beyond the village borders.
While SYVM operated initially only in rural areas, PremaVidya was established as a project to target “at risk” youth in urban areas. “At risk” youth in this case refers to the children who are in danger of not passing their SSLC 10th Standard exam. Passing 10th Standard is extremely important because without a 10th Standard certificate, you cannot go on to finish high school, and you can forget about going on to university of a technical college. PremaVidya decided that helping children to pass the SSLC exam was a worthy endeavor, and they are actually one of the few non-profit organizations that conduct academic interventions at a secondary education level. Most education related non-profits focus on primary school intervention, but PremaVidya wanted to be able to reach those students who were already past primary school age, and who wouldn’t really be able to escape the cycle of poverty without a solid education. So PremaVidya implemented a variety of afterschool academic tutoring programs and soft skills classes, scholarship opportunities and money saving plans for parents of these children. Now, these programs have been quite successful. Children inducted into these programs have a much higher pass percentage than those students who have no intervention. However, running all of these after school programs and tutoring sessions was quite labor intensive and harder to scale, so PremaVidya decided to try a different approach to academic intervention, and implemented Project 1947.
Project 1947 gets its name from the year of Indian Independence and freedom from Great Britain. Project 1947 develops academic videos that comply with the national curriculum, and are free to the public. These videos have no intellectual property rights and can be obtained and distributed by anyone. The whole aim of the academic videos is to supplement weak areas in the school system and curriculum. Children are not allowed to fail in government schools, so they are often moved forward through the system without ever really understanding the basics. Project 1947 aims to address this issue. It produces three different types of videos, curriculum videos, re-teach videos, and teacher videos. Curriculum videos teach the material in the curriculum for each 8th, 9th and 10th Standard. Often, children will not have a fundamental understanding of the skills that need to come before say, learning quadratic equations, so a re-teach video is used to teach the students about basic algebra and linear equations before they go on to learn about the quadratic formula. The videos are innovative in several ways; for one, most children are visual learners (67% according to the statistic they gave me). Traditionally, teaching in government schools, where these video programs are implemented, is heavily reliant on pure lecture, with very little visual examples. These videos explicitly give children visual examples, which help most of them understand the material better.
Another goal of the videos was to give the children the opportunity to practice peer to peer learning, as some of the implementation strategies involve watching videos in groups, and then using strategies such as “teach a friend” to facilitate better understanding of the topic. Project 1947, and PremaVidya itself aims to instill confidence amongst its students. Students may write down their questions on “doubt slips” that the teachers will go over and answer later in class. This takes some of the authority out of the school system, where teachers can seem so inaccessible students hesitate to ask questions, and in turn never fully understand the new material. This video curriculum is actually quite scalable because the DVDs can actually be put online, and distributed freely. Additionally, PremaVidya partners with local sponsors and schools to produce the funding required to purchase projectors and DVD players. This way, PremaVidya mitigates the cost of this project, and can redirect funds to other projects.
So that’s PremaVidya-SVYM in a nutshell. Last week, my group and I spent a few days learning how the videos are produced, and this week we will begin working with the quality team, which measures the appropriateness of the video before it’s widely distributed, and also monitors the effectiveness of the video after distribution. Please feel free to view the videos that Parisa, Maddy, Navee, and I created as a tutorial project last week. We had a lot of fun putting together these videos!
(Disclaimer: we were instructed to create a video on ANYTHING we wanted to, so we did, ergo our choice of Vermont tourism and different types of humor).
In addition, I will say that being out in the field this past week has really allowed me to have a better understanding of PremaVidya’s business model, and how to evaluate business models in general. Evaluating the business model in class last spring was always something I found quite challenging, but able to see individual business models in action gives me personally a much better understanding of a) what business models actually are, and b) how in fact, they work. One thing I’ve been taking away from this experience is that Social Entrepreneurship is really, really hard to teach theoretically, and that this field experience is integral to my understanding of social enterprises.
