BUILDING EMPATHETIC TIES THROUGH COMMUNITY IMMERSION
By team Sanjhi Sikhiya
Our Cohort II in Patiala has completed 5 months of their journey as young leaders working closely with the local administration in their respective cluster (the administrative term for 7–8 schools located nearby) covering 6 blocks. The Cluster Transformation Program (CTP) has a two-faced approach, one involving how learning can happen best in classrooms and the other is connecting the community (Panchayat, School Management Committee, Parents, Alumnus) back to school. The focus in the initial few months was on building relations with teachers, clusters, block officials, and the community.
Gradually, Young Leaders felt the need to understand the different layers in the community and socio-cultural aspects of villages. Our vision of institution strengthening (eg. SMCs, Panchayat) required an in-depth understanding of “as is” of the current situation before we could effectively intervene. Structures at the village level were found to be mostly on paper and less in reality. The team felt the need to dig deeper and understand issues through the lens of parents, who form the major part of the community. We collectively decided to explore village Bhadson, along with Professor Kuldeep (from Punjabi University) for their support and willingness to welcome group of outsiders to their community.
Hence, we designed a community immersion activity for our Cohort II with these objectives in mind -
1. Understanding and analyzing the prevailing context that forms the mindset of community members (parents and others)
2. Critically thinking for processes and stakeholders which help in covering the gap between reality and the current role of School Management Committees
3. Exploring and understanding the working of the Panchayat system in schools and reasons for the same.
Our Beginning
We started the day by practicing union of mind, body, and soul with honorable Navtej Singh Johar on the premises of village gurudwara. It was a wonderful feeling to be able to have let go of our thoughts for some time and calmly be present at the moment and just breathing.
We had a total of 15 members and three institutions to understand and interact within these two days. We divided ourselves into smaller groups such that, pre-existing knowledge among YLs (about target stakeholder) and gender was balanced in all three groups. So we came up with a team Panchayat, SMC, and Parents/ community.
Field Insights
We tried to gather the current understanding of stakeholders regarding their roles and what vision they have for the school of the village. We asked a mix of open, probing, and process questions to gather their opinions. Some words which can help us co-relate to respondent answers were conflict solver, watchdog, signing authority, grant allocation, fundraising, daily wagers, status, etc. We also learned about some technical aspects like villages having the majority of reserved categories gets double the amount of grant for village Panchayat fund. Some challenges seen across stakeholders was lack of collaboration amongst stakeholders groups and villages as a whole on issues like education and school development. This divide is caused by multiple factors including politics, gender, and caste. They sometimes look for a leader who can unite them and streamline their energy. Closure of discussion with stakeholders was brought about by YLs by attending to the knowledge or mindset gap among them. They tried to articulate immediately actionable steps for stakeholders. In one of the instances, a YLs shared her contact number with a women Panchayat member, to consistently motivate her to participate in her role actively.
Role Playing to Synthesize Learnings
The whole day is filled with new experiences and energy, we wanted to synthesize in a way that could be effective and unusual from our routine approaches. So we decided to role play with the respective teams, bringing stakeholder opinions to the forefront with the evidence they discovered during the field visits. This approach of capturing reality was exciting and fun, both in terms of teams having to prepare and eventually, getting an insight into other stakeholder mindsets.
The two-day community immersion was not only an insightful learning opportunity but also turned out to be an inner transformational experience for our team. It helped us build an understanding of the overall community and its stakeholders’ role towards school management and development. The entire experience was exploratory and enlightening as we stayed with the community at their homes, to get a glimpse of their everyday lives. It also allowed us to understand problems from their perspectives/ take on the importance of school and education. This becomes all the more important when the team is quite diverse in terms of experience and geographical place that they have come from.
