Mentor India starts at Vindhya E-Infomedia Private Limited
We had a very busy month of March, after winding up a spectacular Mentor India pilot phase finale with Vilas Nayak. We raised a generous amount of INR 1,20,902 from 29 backers through crowdfunding and worked hard with Foresee Multimedia to put together the open source curriculum in comic book format.
We feel great pleasure to inform you that the book is getting into an amazing shape and we are counting down the number of days left to launch it online. We have named the book – Mitra Pustak, where Mitra stands for Mentor India to Raise and Ace! Things are going perfectly in our favor with your support, and with the arrival of summer vacations for our students, we could have enjoyed a laid-back couple of months. But we thought otherwise!
There is this famous saying that inspires us every day- “The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” Having planted our tree in Chikkarasinakere, we wanted to give ourselves a chance to sow the seeds of paying it forward in a corporate setup. Pavithra YS, the founder of Vindhya E-Infomedia Private Limited, which chiefly hires employees with disabilities, welcomed us wholeheartedly and encouraged us to help in upskilling her employees using our 30-hour interactive open source Mentor India curriculum. And here we are!
2nd April, 2016 marked our foray into the corporate world and now we have a clear idea of the audience our Mentor India curriculum can effectively cater to. Our first target audience will always be our beloved rural high school children and the second will be small and medium-sized enterprises, who want to introduce the basic skills required in the corporate world to their employees. Of course, we had to tweak our content a bit to suit the corporate audience, and have added some topics like Agile & NLP that can be useful for them.
On week 1, six teachers opened up the World of Introduction to our batch of the Fantastic Fifty-Four employees of Vindhya. We spent close to 4 hours interacting and ice-breaking with them. The age group of this crowd was either the same as us or older, which we thought could be a hurdle. But we were wrong!
Many candidates got off their wheelchair to get their hands dirty with crayons on a chart paper. Enthusiasm demonstrated by the candidates was truly heartwarming and very infectious. We had to put together a very inclusive session so that everyone, including our favorite candidate who is visually impaired- Miss Ashwini, takes home the same experience. And we think, by the end of the session, the electrifying presentations done by the 11 teams that we formed were a testimony that we had been able to successfully adapt Mentor India to the new environment.
We have 4 more weeks to go and we are leaving no stones unturned to make our corporate debut a success. Vindhya goes with the tagline- FIDELITY – QUALITY – HUMANITY. We seek your constant support for our fidelity to humanity in order to bring out the best mentored Indians.
Please get in touch with us if you would like to sponsor the printing cost of Mitra Pustak (we still are figuring out how to raise the funds for it) or put us in touch with someone who would be interested in sponsoring for a cause like this. Also, most importantly, do get in touch with us if you would like to volunteer to teach our batches.
Thank you all so very much for your persistent support. Wish us luck!
