The Reason I'm Here

I know that many of you have been wondering what I've been working on during these past two months in India, so I wanted to share a bit about my volunteer project with Jatan Sansthan.

Jatan Sansthan is a grassroots voluntary organization, a Non Governmental Organization (NGO), focused on the development of local communities through the implementation of project based initiatives. “Jatan works with children, adolescents, youth and women on various issues that include: education, life skills, reproductive health, menstrual health, nutrition, violence, governance, and livelihood.” (Jatan)

As an NGO, Jatan has grown relatively quickly over the past 15 years, taking on a large range of projects from many different sponsors. And while the organization is located in Udaipur, many of the projects are located outside of the city. The combination of organizational growth and expansion of projects has had a direct impact on the ability for Jatan to operate efficiently and effectively. Since I brought with me my consulting experience from West Monroe Partners, we agreed that the best use of my skills and knowledge was to develop and implement a plan for Jatan's organizational development. In order to create a functional and sustainable plan (one that can be implemented after I leave), I broke up my volunteer project into three phases: Gap Assessment, Roadmap & Planning, and Implementation & Sustainability. Phase I of the project is focused on understanding the issues, challenges, and gaps that Jatan's management organization and program coordinators deal with on an ongoing basis. Phase II of the project utilizes the findings from Phase I (Gap Assessment) of the project to create a project roadmap (list of prioritized projects on a timeline) that address Jatan's growing pains and ongoing issues. Phase III of the project is the implementation of the project roadmap - solving the various gaps and preparing Jatan for the future. Since describing the project doesn't really highlight the work that I've done, I'd like to share a few highlights and stories from the past few months.

In order to complete the Gap Assessment piece of my project, I was privileged to have the opportunity to travel to Jatan's five offices and multiple project sites. It was here that I was able to learn about Jatan's work first hand. During these visits, I sat down with program coordinators and field workers to discuss the projects in depth and to understand the challenges they face.

One such visit was to Kotda, a village located close to the Gujrat border. The point of this visit was to learn about the Love project and iDiscover Fellowship which was being implemented by a partner NGO, Kshamtalaya. The focus of this project is to bring young people (“iDisco Fellows”) who are passionate about making a difference into the classrooms and communities of these villages. By traveling to Kotda, I saw first-hand how these iDisco Fellows are making an impact. When visiting one of the local schools, I witnessed how two of the teachers were sitting at a desk outside of a classroom while the kids were running around and playing in the school yard. Although this may look like a recess break from the outside, these teachers often spend the entire day sitting outside instead of teaching, taking away the very education to which these students are entitled. The Fellow at this school has decided to help create a stronger administrative function (which previously didn't exist) for the school while also clearing out the nearby field to create a soccer pitch for his students. His goal is to ensure that these children receive a quality education allowing them to continue on to secondary school. At a more organized school, another Fellow taught her students about the importance of hygiene and its impact on health. After showing her students a video of a homemade hand washing station, one of her students built his own for his hamlet. Learning about these experiences first hand provided me with perspective as I was able to see the direct impact that a single person could have on a school while simultaneously seeing the challenges that education-based projects face. Secondly, developing an understanding of Kshamtalaya and its projects has the added benefit of ensuring that I focus on asset-based projects to solve the identified gaps and challenges.

When I visited Jatan's Rajsamand Office (1.5 hours away from headquarters in Udaipur), I conducted four separate interviews for four separate projects. These interviews provided me with valuable insight as to the challenges and issues that project teams face. One project, Child Line, is focused on protecting the rights and welfare of children through community education and via socialization of the 24/7 Child Line phone number which can be dialed by anyone to help save or protect a child. While this project has been operational for over a year and a half, it has done so without receiving its budget from the government. This specific project also experiences challenges that most people would never think about such as dropped calls - the "Child Line" number sometimes drops due to issues with local mobile connectivity leading the team to encourage people to dial twice or more. But even with these issues, the project team continues to work and support children. I was even lucky enough to witness them jump from store front to store front in order conduct a survey regarding child labor while simultaneously reminding shop keepers that child labor is illegal.

Through these site visits I was able to capture information from 23+ interviews across 18 different projects and core management functions. This enabled me to create deliverables (documents) that highlight and summarize Jatan's gaps, issues, and challenges. Having recently presented my Gap Assessment to Jatan's Management team, I'm now in the middle of identifying and prioritizing projects that can help address my findings. The goal is to build an actionable project roadmap which can be kicked off in 2018.

Now I know that was a lot of consultant speak and that I only focused on brief stories about site visits, so I've decided to share a few photos below from my experience at Jatan Sansthan. I have a feeling that once we kick off Phase III: Implementation & Sustainability, I'll be able to tell a more holistic story about my volunteer work here in India and its impact on the organization. So until then, here are a few photos from my work in the field and at Jatan!

Cheers!

P.S. If you are curious, here are a few of the simple projects on the roadmap that I feel comfortable sharing: "Employee Recognitions at Monthly Meetings", "Furniture and Wifi for Bhilwara Office," and "Computer Literacy Training." Currently, there are 33 projects on the roadmap.