By Hamna Aamir | Senior Associate, Development and Partnerships
Dear partner,
We hope you are well and the summer months are proving to be exciting. Teach For Pakistan has been home to plenty of eventfulness the past few months as we prepare for the new academic year. June marked the conclusion of the 2022 cohort’s Fellowship as they were inducted into our ever-growing Alumni network. As we see one cohort leave us, we are ecstatic to welcome another to the Teach For Pakistan community - the 2024 cohort, to be placed in both Islamabad and Karachi! These Fellows are currently undergoing their six-week pre-placement training before they begin teaching in schools for the next two years. Second-year Fellows from the 2023 cohort are also soon expected to begin their second and final year of the Fellowship, and focus on deepening their work and relationships with their students, schools, and communities.
Details from the past quarter are highlighted below:
The Pledge
In the first week of June, Teach For Pakistan welcomed 87 Fellows into our Alumni network, now consisting of 300+ leaders! These Fellows have showcased extraordinary leadership in their unique contexts, having taught more than 8,000 students across 47 schools in the rural sub-sectors of Islamabad. This group of Fellows also designed and implemented a total of 37 Community Partnership Projects (CPPs) in their school communities - the highest number of CPPs a singular cohort has executed in one cohort! The focus areas for these projects ranged from career awareness, parental engagement, and financial literacy to much more. For a detailed look into these projects, take a look here.
Teach For Pakistan commemorated the cohort’s achievements through The Pledge. Co-hosted by the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, this event was a celebration of the graduating cohort’s unwavering dedication to Pakistan’s children and a renewal of our collective commitment to ensuring that all children in Pakistan receive a quality education.
With more than 400 guests in attendance, this event was a testament not only to the incredible work Fellows have done over the past two years, but also our students, who have time and again taken up the challenge of pushing themselves further and harder beyond expectations. The Pledge symbolizes hope, perseverance, and most importantly - a vision for a better future. With this in mind, for the first time in Teach For Pakistan history, our students set the tone for the event program with an anthem meant to inspire hope and instill in all of us a sense of responsibility for the students’ and our country’s future.
Watch the full performance here.
Another highlight of the event were the Leadership Breakthroughs, delivered by Fellows and students. These Breakthroughs were stories of achieving inspiring outcomes against all odds, and an embodiment of what it means to work both within and against a system to achieve one's goals. Speakers shed light on their perseverance in service of growth and spoke on STEM teaching and learning as a gateway to whole-child development, collective leadership, and student voices as catalysts for change amongst others.
The full playlist for these talks can be found here.
On the Flipside: Students envision the Pakistan they want
Also unveiled at The Pledge was a project Teach For Pakistan has spent the past year working on. With your support, our students have not only learned to read but are writing their own thoughtful essays. Collected from 20 schools and over 1,000 students, ‘On the Flipside’ is a compilation of shortlisted essays written by students on the themes that make up the essence of our work: Leadership, Centrality of Education, Educational Inequity, Community Engagement, and Vision for Student Success etc. Of the 100+ essays forwarded by Fellows, a Teach For Pakistan staff committee selected one essay from each of the themes as winners in their respective categories.
This booklet was an effort to create spaces for our students to exercise their voice, express their thoughts, and lean into their agency, all in the pursuit of centering student voices, which are oft excluded. This collection holds power not only through it’s content, but the very fact that students are now sharing their experiences as beneficiaries of the public school system as well as drivers for how to change it.
Read through the shortlisted essays here
The Pledge provided the Teach For Pakistan community an opportune moment to not only look back at the incredible work Fellows and students have done over the course of the last two years, but also provided a window into the endless possibilities that await the graduating cohort. While our journey with the cohort has come to an end with them as Fellows, we are more excited than ever to bear witness to all they will achieve from here on out.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser