Step down to step up!

Ever since I joined Vidhya Vidhai, I was keen on understanding programme designing. Though I had the desire to get my hands on it, I did not know that I would get the opportunity very soon to explore programme designing. One fine day, I received an email from Regila (Co-founder of Vidhya Vidhai) mentioning about the Programme Designing Workshop for 4 days. I couldn’t contain my happiness when I saw the email and I started to look forward to the workshop. When the day arrived, Vidhya Vidhai team was clubbed with the Involve team. I felt happy seeing a bunch of people in the same education sector with different approaches – Vidhya Vidhai works with teachers and leaders to build their capacity to achieve quality education among students whereas Involve works directly with students to build their leadership to raise quality leaders for future.

We started our workshop by getting introduced to each other. The day started with a lot of expectations and throughout the workshop, Regila never stopped to surprise us with her facilitating skills. She made all the complex concepts look simple and easy. We were teamed up in the mornings with Involve and in the afternoon with Vidhya Vidhai. This helped me understand each concept very clearly not only from Vidhya VIdhai’s point of view but also from a general perspective. We were given ample time to put the theory into practice in our group activity time. As the saying goes, “True leaders don’t create followers, they create leaders.”, Regila being a true leader was not afraid of imparting her knowledge and skills to her and other team members.

In four days, I gained the confidence to work on program designing on my own. We were made to take a few steps back and down to get more clarity of concepts. It is difficult to come up with just one highlight of the workshop because all the 4 days sessions and activities were super high. Being in the social sector, we tend to very easily take sides and either think from the world or from what we think is real. The importance of finding the gap can be understood only from an intense workshop like programme designing. The question which we often have to ask ourselves while designing a programme for our beneficiaries is, have I understood the gap, have I understood the resistance and is my intervention a practical one? We learned to work on the above by doing a situation analysis. It was a great exercise to do a reality check.

On the second day, we got into the theories and understood how to identify the most influencing and resisting beneficiary. Also, I understood how one can help realize the beneficiary\’s current situation and help them move forward. 

On the third day, we started working on the outcome chain. We faced a lot of challenges while coming up with it. We had to be focused on our focus area while designing the outcome chain. Karunya, Vidhya and I work in different locations and we brainstormed together for a better outcome chain. It was a good exercise for our mind to keep away our past experience and work on something new with a mind as clean as a blank slate. 

On the fourth day, we worked further deep on the terms like outputs, indicators, interventions, etc., (I know it sounds like Greek and Latin!). Involve’s founder Dhivanshu had a bunch of questions raised which gave everyone a clear understanding of the concept because not each programme is one and the same. Though the 4 four days got over in no time, what we learned was like an ocean! There were concepts that I was familiar with and there were concepts which I thought I knew but while working, it was altogether different. It is evident that one should not hesitate to collaborate or be open to learning. We have to step down at times and start from scratches to get more ideas and step up.

-Alice R, School Transformation Lead,