We keep on trying until we succeed
It is always a good idea to look back at the vision and mission to determine our success in these few years. ThinkZone’s vision is that every child should have the opportunity to pursue their dreams. While its mission statement is improving the learning outcomes of children from under-resourced communities by implementing high-quality education programs. In these past few years, the team has worked hard in accordance with the vision and mission of ThinkZone but as Wilma Rudolph said – “Believe me the rewards is not so great without struggle”
When I joined ThinkZone, the TIME fellowship program was already implemented. To give the overall idea of this program, ThinkZone had onboarded educators and provided support through the Teacher app to educate the children of under resource communities. Initially, ThinkZone used to support teachers financially but the idea was not sustainable as the amount we were getting from the community was less and the resources provided by ThinkZone to the educators was much more. The program in that way was not sustainable. To overcome the drawbacks, we encouraged educators on getting paid directly from the community and our role would be limited to helping them in reaching more children, convincing parents, skill development training, teaching children based on their level, and managing everything through the Teacher app. A major help to them is the physical support in the implementation of the program that is done by the local team.
Once the idea of sustainability was solved we ran into another challenge, even after enrolling educators in our fellowship, we could not impact that many children through the program. It was then decided that apart from our after school program, we should do something with the government directly. ThinkZone introduced two new programs the Quality Learning Initiative In Anganwadi at Salipur, Cuttack and Quality Learning Initiative in School at Bhadrak in collaboration with Government. Through these initiatives, we are providing support to Anganwadi workers and primary school teachers in a similar way as with our community educators. The idea turned out to be successful as within 1 year we started getting more leads to work with the government in different districts as well.
With the above-mentioned programs, the team was also working on a community engagement module. This module required remote networks like IVR, automated phone calls, and SMS to reach out to the community and parents to engage with children in their education. When we started it out, the response was less, parents did not see the value in this initiative.
However, things changed when COVID-19 happened. As schools and anganwadis were shut down, parents were looking for alternate solutions. Our community engagement module became a full-fledged Home Based Learning Program to cater to that need. Through this program, we are providing byte sized educational activities to parents through phone calls and SMS so that they can teach their children through these. The program picked up really good and as of now, we are working with the government to reach out to more than 10000 children.
ThinkZone has never taken a step back even when one idea failed. Every time a challenge comes up, team ThinkZone tries to solve it through different strategies, new ideas and we are learning from our mistakes.
We try and try and try until we succeed.
