GlobalGiving.org: Youth Venture India

Catching UP!

Vipin Thek — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:12:16 GMT

On tuesday, 4th October, the youth venture alumni, met up with on Carter Road Cafe Coffee day. There was considerable enthusiasm and excitment, among all of us, because this was the 1st catch up after more than 2 months.

Ashok rathod, founder of Oscar project, shared about his trip to London and how he rasied Rs.30,000 during his trip. He had his trip to London sponsored as part of a soccer training camp, so he got his contacts in Mumbai to connect him with their friends in London and with their help he organized a Bollywood Dinner part in a London pub and raised money for his venture.

Rahul Mankar, founder of Yaar, got invited to Delhi and his venture Yaar, was formally, invited to be one of the partner organizations of Pravah, a national organization based on promoting secularism and leadership in young people.

These were some of the many highlights which the venturers shared. It was fun to catch up, share successes and challenges, get feedback and get reinspired.

Creating Changemaking Companies

Vipin thekkekalathil — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:07:48 GMT

YV venturers who facilitated the event

On the 25th of June, Youth Venture India partnered with Staples India to organize a day of "Engaging with Changemakers" in Mumbai. We had around 50 plus Staples staff participate, and 5 of our venturers facilitated a half day of interactive games, discussions and sharing stories of their venture at Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Staples India donated 450 $ (20,000rs) to YV, which we distributed equally among our venturers. It was inspiring to hear one of the Staples staff, who had earlier attended a YV Summit in US, share his memories of the venturers he met at the Staples Competition in the US and encouraging his colleagues to engage with our venturers.

Summary of the day

The Celebrations!

Vipin — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:03:13 GMT

The alumni of Youth Venture and staff went up trekking a mountain and had 2 days of sharing, reflections and engaged in adventure activities and games.

The intention of this camp was to strengthen the alumni group and also provide them a space to reflect and learn from their experiences as changemakers. We also introduced them to the new team in Youth Venture and the changes in the program going forward.

Do read the attachment and thank you for your support in making this happen

Attachments:

The Celebrations (PDF)

Facilitators Meetup and Planning ahead

Vipin — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:59:04 GMT

On 14th Jan all the Youth Venture facilitators met up at the directors house for a pot luck lunch and catching up. All the ventures has been busy with their individual ventures, so it was fun to meet everyone and hear the exciting news in their lives. Ashok, has managed to increase the number of young people he works with to 140 kids in his community. He has trained 10 other young people to use football as a means to get school drop outs back to school. Ritika is back from her Vipassana course, and couldn't stop talking about her experience. Kritika and Ashok, were invited to Indonesia, to speak at a Asian Youth Summit on 10th December, 2010. An increasing number of ventures has started collaborating with each other to maximize the impact of their ventures. We are now figuring out how do we evaluate and document these milestones. Attached are some of the photos from the get together.

As the current cycle comes to an end, we are planning a 2 day residential camp outside Mumbai for all the youth ventures in Mumbai on the last weekend on Feb. Below is the email invite for the event.

Catching Up:Report on our workshop on 10.10.10

vipin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 05:23:05 GMT

The monsoon in Mumbai was a difficult period for many of the Venturers - some of them lost momentum and their progress slowed significantly. Over the past few weeks, we asked them what they needed to get back on track. We built the workshop around their responses.

Find attached the report of the workshop contents.

Attachments:

YV_PostMonsoon_workshop1.pdf (PDF)

Updates on two of our venturers work

Vipin — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:46:39 GMT

Name:Abdul Sheikh Location:Mumbai Issue: rehabilitaing physically handicapped adults Over the last 3 months, Abdul has: - Has gathered 10 handicapped youth from around Charni road and Churchgate. - Has negotiated with ‘Sankalp’ for a full time space in which to run his venture - Has secured three vendors who have placed orders for the handmade paper bags he makes - His group is being trained by him as they simultaneously produce bags to sell. Adbul plans to use the money made to help rehabilitate the handicapped youth as well as fund the venture ************************************** Name:Apoorva Shaligram Location:Mumbai Issue: Creating documentaries to increase social awarness Over the last 3 months, Apoorva has:

1. Created Short documentaries on: - Aashayein [Published] - School without Walls [Published] - Puranpoli [Published] - Eki- Single women [will be releasing next week] - Paithani [waiting for Editing] - One on Environment [waiting for Editing] 2.Has connected with Sidharth Bhansali and Amit Tondon- Freedom of Expression

3. Is working with Pushkaraj Kelkar on MMRDC project.

4.Has connected with Shantanu Dutta (Oasis Mumbai)

5.Attended the Bangalore workshop got connected with Banglore Film Society.

6.Aashayein has been selected ascone of the best documentries in WAVE

Riding High With The New Cycle - YV 2010

Irawati Karnik — Thu, 06 May 2010 07:04:36 GMT

Inspiration comes in all sizes!

Right from the beginning of this cycle, Youth Venture began on a high note with outreach in 10 organisations and 8 colleges. We also made optimum use of networking sites like Orkut and Facebook to put the word out there. We managed to reach out to 2000 young people for the fellowship this year. There was an added element to the cycle this year, in the form of two introductory sessions before the actual workshops began. In these sessions, we spoke of the process of the fellowship, the young people's issues of interest and engaged them in an evaluation exercise (that was followed up in the first workshop post panel). These two sessions were attended by a total of 68 young people. A facilitation team of 8 alumni venturers had been in the process of being built from start of the year. They were now brought together for focussed preparation for the workshops. Through discussions, activities and exercises, we worked on developing and polishing skills required for good facilitation. The fact that they had once experienced the cycle greatly affected their inputs and helped tremendously. 48 young people turned up for the first workshop and almost all of them continued till the third one was over. An additional challenge this year was the presence of 3 visually challenged youngsters, a physically challenged one and 4 young recovering drug addicts from an organisation named Sankalp. We made sure they felt included and benefited from the workshops as much as everyone else. They went through the entire process with a lot of enthusiasm. This year we also had the advantage of certain members from the global Youth Venture team visiting. They had brought along 3 very young Spanish venturers who interacted with the entire group and shared stories. It was fantastic to see the young people acquire a sense of the larger global community. Two weeks after the third workshop we conducted the panel. We invited 36 panelists drawn from the business, social and media sector and the venturers presented their ideas with confidence and creativity. We had very interesting conversations with the panelists after the panel where they offered their expert inputs regarding taking Youth Venture forward and providing support to the venturers. We had a great variety of panelists who were left extremely charged, touched and inspired by the experience. There were 15 venturers that were given conditions by the panelists. The rest were ready to launch. We discussed their plans of action with the venturers who were ready and they were given their first installment of the seed investment. The ones with conditions were helped with understanding them. After a month, we held a repanel and had them present again. This time panelists thought that 3 of them were better off being team members rather than lead venturers. They were told this and have now been incorporated into other teams. A total of 33 venturers made it through the entire process and are now running their ventures. On the same weekend as the repanel we held the first workshop post panel. The venturers shared their progress with each other (including venturers from previous cycles) and spoke of their plans ahead. We also got them to set milestones so that they could watch carefully their process of moving forward. A follow up of the evaluation exercise was done to see how far they had come and what those areas might be that they thought they needed to work on. We had invited two resource persons to interact with them : Abhishek Bharadwaj and Shirin Juwaley. The venturers were thrilled with their stories and asked many questions about the what their journey had been like. We are currently in the process of visiting venturers as they conduct sessions or work on their respective ventures. The next workshop is planned tentatively on the 23rd of May.

I can do it and I will!

Three cheers for dreaming big!

New Year, New Group of Changemakers

Vipin T. — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:42:03 GMT

Krithika shares her journey as a Changemaker

For Youth Venture India 2010 has seen new additions to the Community of Changemakers. Over the last few months the Youth Venture India Team has reached out to young people and invited them to apply for the Youth Venture Fellowship. At colleges, organizations and public events we asked young people about the issues they are passionate about and what they’re willing to do about it. Fifty young people have started ideating and designing a project on an issue they wish to lead change in. Better yet, the workshops that enable this process are being led by a group of seven young individuals who have been through this experience and are running Ventures of their own.

The opportunity for Changemakers from previous years to facilitate the workshops has been possible through the initiative taken up by the alumni from previous cycles. Venturers from the past two years organized a group meet where they got together and discussed their interest to stay involved and engaged with each other and the program. At Youth Venture we are keen to keep this momentum going and encourage Venturers to take up leadership positions within the program. Facilitation is one such opportunity and this will be extended to other roles as well.

Currently, our energy is focused on this new group of fifty young individuals who are daring to dream and chasing it in reality. You can support us by providing resources that will enable these young individuals to make change happen.

Youth Venture Outreach

Group activity at a Youth Venture workshop

Ashoka's Youth Venture India

Vipin T. — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:16:20 GMT

The last four months here in Mumbai have been of conclusions and new beginnings. At the time of our last update the second cycle of Youth Venture was coming close to its conclusion.

To celebrate the initiative and work under taken by Youth Venture’s young Changemakers in this past year we organized the 2nd Annual Youth Venture Celebrations: “Celebrating Changemakers”. This event took place on the 21st of June, 2009 and twenty young people were felicitated by an audience of 500 and 3 guest speakers for completing their 1 year fellowship where they designed, built and ran a project on a social issue about which they are passionate.

Guest speaker Anshu Gupta, founder of Goonj and Ashoka Fellow, spoke about the quality of entrepreneurship. He said that entrepreneurs are often labeled as crazy and only with time do their ideas gain acceptance, catch fire and spread. Dancer, activist and aspiring politician Mallika Sarabhai highlighted the quality of teamwork while Vivek Sawant, founder of Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited, talked about the necessary skill of leadership.

Each young person was spotlighted with a video and brought on stage to receive a certificate and speak about their experience as a Changemaker. It is an inspiring fact that fourteen of these twenty young people are in the process of scaling their projects into year two.

This passion and determination is the driving force for Youth Venture as we gear up and raise resources for our upcoming cycle in Mumbai. Support young Changemakers by donating to Youth Venture India.

Watch the video of our Celebrations at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMGm6EZynuk&feature=channel.

Catch our young people in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R86LhW0Cxk

Links:

Youth Venture

Vipin T. — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:37:22 GMT

Here at Youth Venture we have been focusing on our largest asset, the community of changemakers. In the past four months we have had two workshops in Mumbai, where we brought in a diverse group of resource people from the corporate, social, media and entertainment sectors to come speak about their work and life journey. Through these sessions we are building a means for our changemakers to see that there are more ways to reach success than the traditional paths that have been taken. At the same time we are mirroring the diversity that is apparent in the community.

In addition to this, we have kicked off two new initiatives, which will be incorporated into our larger cycle. The first is a mentoriship program where mentors are an additional support system for the changemakers. This gives them the opportunity to play the part of a sounding board for ideas as well as enable these young changemakers to think through the obstacles they face.

From the 6th to the 10th of May we were in Songadh, Gujurat conducting a workshop. While there we went to 13 villages of our changemakers to film them and the work they are doing.

These two locations embody diversity, be it class, caste, economic background, age, vernacular, issues they are working on and so on. It is this diversity that we as a team are proud of and hope to carry forward to the upcoming cycle.

With your support, we will publicly celebrate the achievements of these changemakers so that greater society realizes and embraces the power of youth-led social change!

Attachments:

Building the Community of Young Changemakers

Vipin Thekkekalathil — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:56:28 GMT

Mumbai Workshop

* In October the Youth Venture staff did one to one and group meetings with the venturers, helping them think through their challenges and connecting them with resources insides and outside the Ashoka network.

* In November we organized a one day workshop on Planning for their venture, helping them to refine their venture plans keeping in mind the learning’s from the last 2 months after panel and their goals for the next 8 – 10 months. The workshop was facilitated by our venturers from last year, who had gone through training sessions done by experts in the field, who built their capacity to train the current batch of venturers.

* In December, we had a very successful trip to a conference on Social Entrepreneurship in Chennai organized by Unltd India. A report on the trip is attached.

* In December, we also organized a one to one session for our venturers who are working on the issue of education with an Ashoka fellow named Rajeev Vartak, who is using innovative tools and methods to teach science and maths to children. Besides getting an opportunity to hear the challenges and successes from Rajeev, in the initial years of his work, the venturers also gained valuable skills on teaching, which they now can pass on to the children then engage with, as part of their venture

Songadh Workshop

Links:

Attachments:

Recap of UnLtd India Conference in Chennai (PDF)