Leaving for India

Dear friends,

On Sunday, I am traveling to India as part of The College of Wooster's 2011 Global Social Entrepreneurship team.  We will be working with two NGOs in Bangalore- one which helps underprivileged children build life skills and another that helps disabled adults find employment.  The 2011 team includes myself, three peers, and a Wooster prof who will serve as our adviser.  I will be working from May 26-July 8 and afterward I will travel for 2.5 weeks around India.  I hope you enjoy my writings and reflections as I embark on this experience.

The Team.  Back: Kipaya '12 (International Relations), Sam '13 (Economics), Sarah '12 (Communication Studies) Front: Erika '13 (Global Sustainability Studies)

For additional readings (including an introduction to Team GSE 2011), please check out GSE's blog: http://global_se.scotblogs.wooster.edu/.  

Peace,
ET

GSE 2011 is off and running

Amyaz, Kipaya, Sam, Erika, and Sarah at UTC (our lodging) on our official start day 2011.05.26

Hi all,
After two days of lovely exploring in Bangalore (veg food, salwar kamiz, monsoon, cockroach, autorickshaw, etc), we began our two days of orientation for GSE.  We met with representatives and/or visited the following organizations, discussing how each social enterprise functions and also various topics in social entrepreneurship:

• Sattva (more on them later)
• ivolunteer, which connects volunteers and NGOs in India and worldwide
• Center for Social Initiative and Management (CSIM), which does training for people interested in social enterprise
• Ashoka Foundation, which provides resources for social entrepreneurs
• Selco, which provides alternative energy sources at affordable costs in rural areas
• Industree/Mother Earth, which works with Indian producers to sell environmentally/socially sustainable products

Yesterday after lunch we visited Sattva in the Indira Nagar district.  This was my favorite part of the entire orientation.  Sattva is a social enterprise which does consulting work for social enterprise (any NGO, business, or organization that works for social chane).  What I think is really cool, though, is that Sattva has an online publication that targets people who are not yet involved in the social change sector (http://thealternative.in/).  They want to make social justice topics more accessible to the "layperson" and they want to know how to communicate those messages in an important way.  This I believe is truly valuable; social change cannot occur in a bubble.  If you want systemic change then you need more than just your social entrepreneurs.

GSE Team and a few Sattva members (yes, there are women- they just left before we took the photo)

Sattva was also personally inspiring for me because I was able to briefly explain my major at Wooster.  My focus in Global Sustainability Studies is to explore the connections between environmental sustainability and social justice.  Right away the Sattva workers began listing off NGOs, contact persons, and places I should visit where I could see these two interests being put into action all together.  It was personally rewarding to see that there are organizations that understand the interconnectedness of injustices and are working with those complexities to solve problems.

I will post a few more photos when I have more access to the Internet and to my peers' photos (I have not taken too many photos on my own camera).  In the meantime, check out SE Wooster's flickr photostream here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/se-wooster/.  I took the banana photos.

On Monday I start work at Enable India, an organization that helps disabled adults find employment in a number of awesome ways.  I will leave you with two of the few photos I actually have on my camera to give you a sense of what India can look like.

National Market in Bangalore 2011.05.24

Please post comments!  Peace,
ET