The story of Vidhya Vidhai

It was that time of the year when the city life just slows down and seems all chilled! The day seemed so perfect with slow breezes and the lush green campus in Azim Premji University. Admiring the sips of hot coffee, I rushed to my class as I had my class on Managing schools in India by Prof. Sujatha Rao and she doesn’t like being late to class.

The class started with the problems that our schools are facing and how are these problems connected to each other. The stream of norms, beliefs, values, traditions and the web of influences that goes behind the school culture. How the ideas of leadership are connected to the ideas of organization?

There were many thoughts that was running in my mind on how do we solve these problems in existing schools?  And at that time my Professor made a point saying School improvement is not just improving certain domains of the schools but effective school improvement refers to planned educational changes that enhances student learning outcomes as well as the school’s capacity for managing change. With lot of insights and mind full of ideas, I ran to my friend Ram Prakash to share and surprisingly he too was wanting to share something. We went for a quick coffee break and over a coffee we shared our idea of initiating School improvement in Tamil Nadu. We started penning down our ideas on school improvement and the thought that started in the University canteen has still not stopped!

We don’t know if there is something called luck! But we do believe in luck. Indeed, we were fortunate to meet the right people at the right time. May it be our Professors who always supported and motivated us, our friend Shri Karpagam from IIT-M who decided to join hands with us offline or may it be Khushboo and Santosh. I still remember, during our placements when Ram and I were confused whether to sit for placements or no. On the first day of placement, we just happen to enter a room where presentation of Mantra4Change was scheduled. This was the place where we gained confidence that whatever we have written on our paper can actually work in reality. It was some sought of magic that happened in us because whatever we thought and whatever ideology we had, an organization is working with the same ideology and doing all this in reality. This got in more excitement in us and we decided to start our organization with the help of all the good people we met in this path.

Thus the idea of Vidhya Vidhai was born which took its shape on 27^th May 2017 with a vision to create an egalitarian society through education. Vidhya Vidhai aims to build an ecosystem that provides equal access and opportunity to quality education through all stake holders in school like Management, Principal, Leaders, Teachers, Parents and Students.

At present, Vidhya Vidhai is working on Whole School Transformation with two schools in Tamil Nadu. We are also proud to be the first cohort of Edumentum, 2017. Stay connected to know more about our experiences.

-Regila Marinus, Vidhya Vidhai