Youth Venture India

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.