India doesn’t need heroes, it just needs a handful of passionate people willing to get out there and solve problems on the ground.

This is the story of my organization ThinkZone, which is running a revolutionary experiment that can solve the educational crisis in India by developing youth from low-resource settings into the edu-leaders.
In this post, I am only going to focus on how youth become skillful through ThinkZone fellowship and if you think I make sense, share this post with as many people as possible.

In 2015, Mr. Binayak Acharya, the founder of ThinkZone, realized that there are so many efforts on the ground, but children aren’t developing fundamental skills, while there is a large unorganized coaching industry populated by less skilled or semi-skilled individuals in different parts of India. So, he decided to step into the ring with a vision to build an organization that can give access to quality education to each and every child while skilling the youth of India.

and that is how ThinkZone was born…..
Over the past 7 years, ThinkZone has gone from 1 district to 7 districts with 4000+fellows in Odisha who are positively impacting more than 25 thousand children. But what’s more astounding is not the growth of ThinkZone but how Binayak decided to start a revolutionary experiment to solve the education sector crisis in India.

Teachers face many challenges when it comes to delivering quality content to students, and most youths who want to teach or even work as tuition teachers lack the skills to do so. Now, every educationalist and policymaker in this country knows about this and many have even spoken about it. But very few have done something proactively to fix this problem.
This is how the ThinkZone fellowship was started to empower passionate youths who want to do something for their communities. Now what is unique about the fellowship is that fellows are not ‘placed’ in a particular community but are actually from the same area.  

During the fellowship, the youth develop 21st-century skills and get to understand about activity-based learning methodologies. And they utilize these skills to teach children in their own communities. In short, a passionate youth turns into an effective educator. They are able to work as teachers during & after the fellowship without even paying anyone and in fact earning while teaching children in their own communities.

ThinkZone believes that skillsets and abilities are far more valuable than paper credentials. 
I have personally witnessed many success stories and one such story is that of Satabdee who had joined the ThinkZone Fellowship program sometime back. Satabdee joined as a ThinkZone Fellow, started teaching children in her village, and helped them develop foundational literacy and numeracy skills. She then started onboarding many youths from her community and was then provided an opportunity to train them. 

Fast forward to a few months later, today, Satabdee works as a Program Associate at ThinkZone and diligently works in the very same organization where she was enrolled as a fellow.

The entire team at ThinkZone is working day in and day out to expand the scope of the fellowship program in newer geographies. I have every reason to believe that the ThinkZone fellowship program is a scalable model that can be replicated by several organizations all across the country.

And instead of giving out donations for a short-term impact, organizations through this model can create a long-term impact. They can create a win-win scenario wherein youths get skilled and children get quality education.
You can imagine the kind of magical revolution to come up if many organizations start setting up these kinds of fellowship models to build a direct bridge between children and youth.

This is the reason why we need to start promoting incredible ideas like these. So that, we can have many such organizations like ThinkZone, who don’t just talk about the problems but also act on the solutions which will make India realize its true potential.

If you agree with me then help me spread this message and share this article with as many people as possible So that we can send out a very strong message out there that India doesn’t need heroes, it just needs a handful of passionate people willing to get out there and solve problems on the ground.
Thank you.