ICA Youth Program –By Unmesh Sheth

ICA is happy to announce the successful launching of its pilot youth program during June-July 2008. Initiated in partnership with InSPIRE (SummerInIndia.org), it aims at educating and engaging young generation of USA, mainly with South Asian roots, in community development and exposing them to Indian culture.ICA initially plans to focus in areas such as health, environment, education, child/community development, women empowerment and e-Governance. Both these NGOs also seek to establish a Fellowship Fund for Leadership so as to help the young volunteers cultivate social activists in India to build their own capacity to find creative and innovative to fulfill their mission. (Details with Unmesh Sheth at <ica@icaonline.org>)

ICA and InSPIRE entertain applications from the youth for this 5-week summer program who seek self-development. The mission of both these non-profits is to connect the youth to their cultural roots and realize their potential for making difference in India and the world. The inaugural program of summer 2008 conducted under the supervision of InSPIRE coordinators proved to be encouraging and stimulating for the participants. All felt purposively initiated to learn more about the cultural and developmental aspects of India though their first time, first-hand experience of varied grass-roots development NGOs.

This has created a reasoned optimism that along with its first Family Program, the Youth Program will help participants of all ages to focus on self-development of EACH one, nursing the qualities such as personal responsibility, human compassion with a global perspective..

Some details about some of our activities will bear us out in this matter. We stayed at Environmental Sanitation Institute at Sughad near Gandhinagar.  Our three-day experience at this internationally recognized and imaginatively conceived center for environmental education can not be adequately demonstrated through a video presentation as much as we really had a feel as enlightened participants of this program. We cherish every moment, individually and as a group, while going through its educative-cum-fun flavored sessions and plays.

Besides ESI, we visited Manav Sadhana at its befitting location—in the precinct of Gandhi Ashram. Observing young kids from slums and poor women being rehabilitated in terms of personal hygiene habits, elegant arts and craft works and earning by selling their wares to graduate to a level of self-reliance and finding a new meaning in life was an unforgettable experience of human renewal promoted by NGOs working from India and overseas.

Besides ESI, under Family Program, we visited ICA-aided Dethali for reviewing its water Management Project. It’s well completed with deepening and expanding of the village talao with 200 M liters water conservation capacity in this village of backward community and its excavated soil, rich manure, already given to small farmers and its stony soil used for constructing an all-weather approach road. We were impressed by the enthused narration by women folk assemble in the panchayat office and relating how they get benefits of micro-finance and the school children operating computers with confidence. It is proving ICA’s income-raising and participative development project.

Under the Family Program, some of us also met with Sanjay and Tula Bhavsar of NGO Vishwagram at Jagudan, near Mehsana, the couple committed to prepare young generation for a better to-morrow for them and for the community. They have trained more than 1,500 teachers who then inculcate awareness about public interest issues among the younger generation. We also observed kids, previously picked up by the as stray, homeless kids, and now being trained to eventually become the part of the mainstream. We also met Reema Nanavaty,an IAS-turned eminent social worker at SEWA-Gram Haat in Ahmedabad.They train tribals in their ethnic craft and help them become self-reliant (their fabrics will be displayed at ICA’s Annual function this year).

My frequent interactions with Chunibhai Vaidya, 92, one of the few ‘Living’ Gandhian in action this time helped me to grasp the necessity and choose strategies for to identifying and prepare young leadership in areas of  social transformation and development who can build a just and peaceful society. He himself is trying to build up new leadership through non-violent struggle, development, reconstruction and transformation (sangharsh, vikas, rachana and parivartan).

Suggestions:

There needs to be a more formatted interaction between various groups that participate in youth programs and volunteers working with NGOs. ICA and InSPIRE may work as felicitators for sharing their experience.

They may also arrange for facilitate older members to share their experience with active young members and figure out how to develop and mature the youth and family program and ensure the maximization of their wider acceptability.

ICA/InSPIRE can help develop their combined future program(s) with Manav Sadhana, ESI and IndiCorps, provided we have right leads from the same groups for family program. Scholarships to felicitate future deserving participants may be instituted or increased.

A footnote to this experience will be relevant and illustrative. Surili Sheth, a teenager student of Ohio State Uni was volunteering at Manav Sadhana when we were visiting this campus and interface with her also. I’m attaching her brief narration of her experience. One can discern the subtle process of change and transformation she is undergoing in though such volunteering.

Let such projects be treated as more than an NGO Tourism as she did. (More illustrations can be given).

Ultimately, ICA-InSPIRE  to-gather may help to usher in, in their modest way, what Gandhi asked the youth “to be a change they want to see in the world.”