February 17, 2023
By Kavyanjali, Community Resource Person, Wayanad
A quarter of Year Two of our Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG) Youth Leadership Programme has passed, marked by a visit from our funder, Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives at our campus in Kotagiri. Read about updates from Year One here.
This programme aims to support community youth in defining the identities of their communities, studying what development means for them, and spearheading development projects. Year One was encouraging, witnessing several successful projects take off!
The six selected youth in this batch of the programme, called Teaching Fellows, are from three tribal commuities, Adiya, Kattunayaka and Paniya, and lead six teams of their own in running development projects within their villages and towns – like renovating houses, building bridges and roads, creating co-studying spaces, holding menstrual health awareness workshops, digital documentation training sessions and working with schools to start environment and culture clubs.
Some of our teams are also engaging themselves in self-profiling exercises. It is important for communities to ‘profile’ themselves, to define their identities on various aspects like culture, development, social structures and more. This involves close study and documentation of their history, culture and ecology. Self-profiling helps create appropriate goals for achieving social impact.
Today, the APPI team visited our Keystone campus and heard from our six teams on progress made on projects and self-profiling exercises.
We also organised a ‘walkout camp’ for indigenous youth aged 13 and above, in collaboration with MSK and SFD. Students of this age group often tend to drop out of the conventional educational system, discouraged by discrimination based on caste/class, owing to persisting deep stigma. Our camp invited such students and enrolled them into skill development courses, and aided them in finding job opportunities.
