Exploring the Self, Serving Communities – The Journey of Gandhi Fellowship

Samuhik Pahal: Please share with us the story of how Gandhi Fellowship began and what it was like in the first few years. What have been the thinking, inspiration and objectives behind the fellowship?

Vivek Sharma: What is interesting is that two great fellowships to emerge from India started at the same time, in the same year – Teach For India Fellowship and Gandhi Fellowship. Both these fellowships have been transformational for India. Fundamentally, we believe that a sector, an industry or a domain grows on the basis of the talent that is available. We believed that the social sector required a new kind of a push, so far as talent was concerned. The pedagogy of classic, old schools of social work needed to change.

“These days in the social sector, community aspirations and our theories of change are not in any degree of synchronization.”

We wanted to create a group of social professionals who have a fundamental orientation of seva or service – service of the community. If you have to serve the community, you have to live among the community. Therefore, we thought of embedding Gandhi Fellows in communities.

Government missions, NGOs need talent. So one of our goals was to meet this demand for quality talent. Another objective was to facilitate the creation of new kinds of organizations by social entrepreneurs. Our challenge was attracting the brightest talent for the social sector who would have seva bhav and would contribute to the public system’s change – that is in the government sector, besides the social sector, media and academia, and a small proportion going into the corporate world. The hope was that this network of people would, in the future, contribute towards reimagining India.

Therefore, we believed that investing in young people was the key. Gandhi Fellowship was visualized as a self-exploratory journey after which young people would take the decision of deciding what they would want to devote their lives to. Because if you love what you do, you would hammer away, chip away at it, for 365 days a year. If you are chipping away at a problem 365 days a year for ten years, then you would end up making a dent. Therefore, we wanted to create this pause between college and university.

We read the millennials well. We thought young people do not want to lead boring lives; they probably want to take some risks and expect more out of their lives. We read the future in the sense that, young people would not necessarily want to read texts alone, that they would want to do things with their own hands. We worked with this adult learning principle, which we call action-reflection pedagogy.

Samuhik Pahal: How is the fellowship structured? What is the logic behind this structure?

Vivek Sharma: The structure of the fellowship is very simple. We selected our fellows from the Indian higher education system. In the first years, we did not have many people from engineering and sciences backgrounds. So initially, there were some arts people, some law folks, some education guys; but this has changed now. Now we get a good number of fellows from engineering and science backgrounds and a fair number from professional courses.

The four semesters were very simple. We thought if we create these cohorts of five Gandhi Fellows in a small block town, give them laptops and dongles and a scooty and they live in the community, and these five fellows along with the supervisor become a last mile micro team and springboard into the block, can they cause significant influence?

Each fellow used to work with five government school headmasters, almost as executive assistants. That was during 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. The time period from two p.m. to eight p.m. ended up becoming community time around the school. Therefore, that became a personal learning lab for the fellows, wherein they experimented with a whole range of ideas – from menstrual health to science education in the community.

They tried to work with headmasters and teachers from a position of collaboration rather than expertise. These collaborations ranged from sprucing up walls in classrooms and playgrounds to making school assemblies and meetings more effective. These young people ended up facilitating many different types of interventions in the schools in both classrooms and non classroom contexts in a nonthreatening way. That is how they made a dent.

We were also thinking about how to place rigor at the center. The supervisor was not a mentor. He just ensured that the fellow did not sham through the 14 hours of the day. What was non-compromisable was sitting for debriefs in the evening.

These debriefs became important learning opportunities. These showed fellows from privileged, metropolitan backgrounds, how it is that folks from smaller cities and towns, especially women, became successful at their work with a much more compassioned and nuanced understanding of the state of affairs.

Through these debriefs, the fellows learnt what works, and what does not work. These debriefs happened six days a week. Every six weeks the fellows sat together with the supervisors for 2-3 days over a long weekend and consolidated. People shared work and learnt from each other’s initiatives. So that’s how the intellectual property, the library of solutions – micro solutions, not grand ones – got created.

“If markets can scale, why can’t social processes scale? It is an organization design issue. It is not a pedagogic issue.”

Another important part of this process was that of community immersion – one month of living in the community without a laptop, a mobile phone, even any money. The fellows were inventive. They found homes, did errands, did things useful for the community. They were humble in the community, because they had to figure out food and shelter there.

This process rewired the young person. An upper caste Hindu kid experienced a Muslim woman, because only an elderly Muslim woman was willing to let him inside the house. For the first time, he experienced living in a Muslim household and realized that “They are just like us.”

All these processes – going to the school everyday, going to the community everyday, and then a mandatory Vipassana course, and forcing silence upon oneself – continued across the four semesters.

There was so much of noise that these young people experienced. Good ideas and inventions are a product of silences. It requires a certain quietude and deep thinking through the microcosm of the problem to figure out solutions.

Therefore, vipassana was just for your own selves’ sake, and for the sake of social change as well. It is still an important feature of the fellowship program. Gandhi Fellows do feel that here is a tool, a practice, which is so good, it is gold standard.

We used a whole set of such design elements in the fellowship program. Then fellows had their sandboxes to make their own experiments. We also organized master classes for them. The higher education system is teacher-led and centered around examinations. Here we were firing different neurons.

These days in the social sector, community aspirations and our theories of change are not in any degree of synchronization. Communities have their own jugad solutions. Replicating them is the problem, not invention itself.

Therefore, community orientation was one of the logics of the fellowship’s structure. We wanted this community focus to become a paradigm for everyone else – that is, for the government and the market as well.

We were also thinking about facilitating a young person who is 20-25 years old to explore herself and figure out what is it that she is good at. The structure aimed to create rigor excellence models, to create empathy before you started seeking solutions, to first have listening skills, to understand the needs of the communities.

We also wanted the fellows to imbibe a culture of teamwork. In our schools, colleges, universities and nuclear families, we have all become self-obsessed. However, we need to work in teams to move the mountains.

How do you build teams? How do you learn from the other? How do you build relationships? How do you narrate the problem? How do I get you interested in the project that I am trying to create?

Moreover, you are not a leader in all seasons. Sometimes you are a leader; most times, you are a follower. How do we build rigor into our following? Therefore, the fellowship was structured around these elements.

The total amount of time envisaged was 10,000 hours under supervision and involved building rigor, creating lasting friendships, discussing and learning from people with a diverse set of backgrounds, working together and figuring out something that is bigger than individual possibilities. Because we were sure that if the orientation was technical, it was not going to solve anything. What is unique about India, what is unique about Mahatma Gandhi, is service leadership. Therefore, the fellowship aimed to foster seva and empathy and tried to discourage any tendencies towards technical solutions.

The buck stopped with the program leaders. The fellows could not be given orders; they had to be inventive. Therefore, the program leaders were constantly listening to the fellows, the program manager was listening to the program leaders, and the program director was listening to the program managers.

As a result, we became a listening organization. This produced an interesting organizational architecture. It is rare that the last mile person is transformational to the organization.

Because the fellow was learning non-violent communication, we were also learning nonviolent communication. Because the fellows were learning to be empathetically listening, we learnt to empathetically listen as well. Listening to the fellows, we realized that so many transformational possibilities exist in our communities.

Samuhik Pahal: What have been the key milestones in the process of growth of the Gandhi Fellowship? What are the key challenges that you have faced in this journey?

Vivek Sharma: The key challenge involved the adults. Adults did not believe that young people could do something useful in the first place. The headmasters did not believe that young people could help them. Education administrators did not believe that 22-year olds could help 55-year olds transform. Parents did not believe that if young people stepped out of the comfort zones of their houses, this would be an appropriate decision for them.

“If you are looking for new ways of engaging with communities, for things to emerge bottom up, for becoming a more compassionate and listening organization…then you stand a chance to run a valid fellowship program.”

Nevertheless, some adults also believed in us. Some parents trusted us. However, the challenge was that parents fought us. They fought their children as well. We lost a lot of beautiful talent as a result.

There was the young woman from rural Rajasthan who thought joining this fellowship would help her fight the patriarchy she was experiencing. She felt this experience would be extremely useful for her. Her professors supported her, but her parents did not.

Once the headmasters found that here was this nonthreatening person helping her find her own meaning, learning, joy, pride, then it became a game changer. Then our fellows were going to the houses of these headmasters and teachers. They were feted by the sarpanchs.

These were good hearts, putting in their rigour and toil creating small artefacts in the community, with the community, for the community. So that challenge of adults not believing in us was short lived.

Samuhik Pahal: Has the design of the fellowship changed over the years? If yes, then in what ways and what has informed this evolution?

Vivek Sharma: Initially the fellows worked with the headmasters. Later the fellows started working at the district level, with DEOs, with DMs, with Collectors – helping them bring convergence around education. It became a district level fellowship. Later it even became a state level fellowship.

The fellows support the government design their organizations and help them with learning, development and technology; basically assisting the government in building the wireframes of a design. So that is what the fellowship has morphed into, working more at the district and state levels. This change happened when six to seven years ago we launched our district level program and four years ago when we started our state level interventions.

The fundamental features of community engagement and having one’s own personal project and vipassana etc. have not changed. However, the school visit is not available to the fellow who is working at the state level. The fellow working at the district level goes to the schools, but not as actively as she is engaged with the district administration.

The design of the processes and the functionalities have changed. Nevertheless, the underlying principles are similar. We try to create competencies like the older ones, but using the district toolkit.

At the district level the fellows are organizing district PMUs, ensuring that the district administration listens to the headmasters, etc. We became a listening organization and now we are trying to ensure the creation of listening organizations within the educational administration and the state-government level bodies.

The first seven years involved deep headmaster level work. The headmasters could not succeed if the district administration was not compassionate and functional. So building that organizational capacity is a task at the district level. Similarly, the state also needs to support the districts. Therefore, you have to do a host of things at the state and district levels.

The headmaster level fellowship is now confined to territories where we are doing deep school-based work. Before we can advocate for whole child development models at the state or district levels, we ourselves need to be convinced about what works and what does not. For that, we have a school level fellowship program. It is the size of the old fellowship. Those numbers have not increased. The expansion has been at the district and the state levels.

Samuhik Pahal: In retrospect what were the things that you would do differently, when you look back at any stage of the fellowship’s journey?

Vivek Sharma: We could have launched the district and state level programs earlier. Organizationally we were experimenting as well. It took us some time to move from that organic model. Introducing seva bhav as a concept, as a central theme, early on in the first semester, as a part of the induction, could have been done better.

When you are driving rigor, often there are discipline issues with young people. It took us a while to figure out the ideal mix for the program. I think we could have been far more efficient in issuing yellow cards.

Samuhik Pahal: How do you think nonprofits in India, especially those working in education, can use fellowships as an intervention tool in furthering desirable social change? What are some of the key mistakes to avoid and important markers to keep in mind?

Vivek Sharma: The statutory warning is that nonprofits should not launch fellowship programs unless they are in love with young people. Nonprofits are very focused on the change that they are trying to make. Moreover, nonprofits sometimes believe that a fellow equals to cheap labour. Which is not true.

Therefore, I always tell my friends who have launched fellowship programs or want to launch fellowship programs, and heads of NGOs, that fundamentally young people are disruptive. You have developed a theory of change. If you need to distribute that theory of change, why do you need a fellowship program? You need a staff. Moreover, if you think fellows are a cheap staff, that is an incorrect hypothesis.

“The statutory warning is that nonprofits should not launch fellowship programs unless they are in love with young people.”

If you are looking for new ways of engaging with communities, for things to emerge bottom up, for becoming a more compassionate and listening organization, looking for error margins – and error margins can be from 10% to 100% – then you stand a chance to run a valid fellowship program.

Samuhik Pahal: In periods of expansion, things tend to come into sharp focus. So if you could please reflect a little more on Gandhi Fellowship’s expansion process ?

Vivek Sharma: The expansion phase is past us now. We expanded in a particular era. The first three batches were all of fifty. When the fourth batch was starting, all the adults in our life told us, “Look! You guys have created a human lab. It is not scalable.”

We thought that if it cannot be scaled, then what is the point of creating a boutique program? We did not want to create an elegant program for 30-40 people.

We wanted to create a program where the adult was not required for learning. In India, where would you get good teachers? In India we do not even have teachers, forget about good teachers. However, can adults learn on their own? Yes, adults can learn on their own. That is the possibility we created with the Gandhi Fellowship Program. The first scale up was the fourth batch, which was 110 people or so. We said we will scale up and if it were not possible, then we would probably not pursue it.

In the early batches, we were personally involved. Now we are hardly involved in running the fellowship program. I do not even get to see the fellows.

We have been able to simplify processes. The program leaders and the program managers are able to run the fellowship program. The senior staff stopped running the fellowship 7/8 years ago. It is the younger people and ex fellows who are running the fellowship now.

Today the issue for me is not of scale anymore. That question has been answered. Young people will learn if you create the right ecosystem for them. That ecosystem is a little bit of a bubble. Inside that bubble, it is for them to explore their selves, to explore social issues and universal concerns that are connected to the self and the social issues…

My sense is, that is a scalable model. That can be done on scale. Human processes are scalable. Quality education is scalable. We are headed there, so far as state level processes are concerned. The district program has stabilized. Different programs are going through different life cycles, so is the fellowship as a whole.

If markets can scale, why can’t social processes scale? It is an organization design issue. It is not a pedagogic issue.