Education Fellowships

This month’s Samuhik Pahal focuses on fellowships – an increasingly important way of working in the social sector. This is equally true in the domain of education. For the present issue of the periodical, we have put together a set of articles that map out the experiences of working with some of the biggest fellowships of the country as well practitioners’ perspectives on what it means to manage these.

The “Ground Zero” piece discusses how organizations across India are using fellowships as an intervention mode to fulfill a range of objectives including nurturing talent at the level of the community, transforming under-resourced government schools, to attracting talent to the social sector, and producing changemakers in the field of teaching and learning STEM subjects.

In an article on the journey of the Teach For India (TFI) Fellowship, Shaheen Mistri and Manasi Jain map out the sojourn of this initiative and the various phases through which it has grown and evolved.

Hitanshi Gandhi describes the experiences of TFIx – an incubation initiative through which nonprofits engage with the process of starting and running their own fellowships; the piece does this by capturing the voices of many grassroots level organizations.

In “Journey of i-Saksham to build local women community Edu leaders: a reflection,” Ravi Dhanuka engages with the experiences of his organization in creating community level leadership in the education domain through a fellowship program.

In an interview, Vivek Sharma details his experiences of co-founding and running Gandhi Fellowship; he shares the ideas behind the genesis of the program, the concepts of seva, community-focus and mentoring of talent that structure the fellowship, and the need for immersion and rigor.