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Revision as of 05:28, 2 August 2018

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Abstract

Rural Youth Volunteers in India is a paired/ twinning program between Lady Irwin College (LIC), University of Delhi and Humboldt State University (HSU), California, which works in collaboration with two local organizations: Environment and Social Research Organization (ESRO) and Grameen evam Pariyavaran Vikas Sansthan (GPVS). The program is supported by the US Mission to India. Both teams are comprised of 8 members, four students from HSU and four students from LIC who are working together for 10 weeks in two rural communities, Daula and Tavelagarhi, with the following objectives.

Overall Objectives of the program :-

  • To assess the needs, resources, and priorities of the communities in relation to social and environmental issues.
  • To initiate social entrepreneurial activities in Tavelagarhi and Daula while working on environmental issues.


The team in Tavelagarhi comprised of seven students, including three students from Humboldt State University (HSU) and four from Lady Irwin College (LIC), Delhi University. The students initiated the community assessment which involved identifying needs, resources, and priorities of the community around water and energy. This assessment involved going door-to-door and conducting interviews and focus group discussions with the community members (especially men and women). The community members reported water as a major problem within the village.

TEAM MEMBERS

Core Team Members :- The whole team is divided into two subgroups, i.e. Product and the Community/School Engagement teams. The product team includes Aakanksha and Ken whereas the community/school engagement team includes Arshiya, Arushi, Haley, Himani and Kimberly. We also engaged community in the project, there names are Akshay, Hrithik, Jyoti, Riya, Raja, Ashutosh and Hemant.

Community Members:- School principals and teachers, School students, ASHA workers, ANM workers, Anganwadi workers, leaders and entrepreneurs in Baraut & Tavlegarhi, shopkeepers in the community and religious leaders

Background

Engagement team :- The basic aim of this sub-team was to engage the school and community members in the bottom-up activities related to water conservation, water treatment, and water crisis; in such a way that the community members were able to build positive relationships and activities to produce their individual and community well-being.The team involved five sub-team members along with eight core team members from the community youth. The core team members were engaged in the community processes with the use of participatory methods that involved learning and creating IEC (Information Education and Communication) materials. Materials like posters, brochure, grassroots comics, community awareness events like education fair, rally, and other innovative ideas like puzzle, floor game, short film etc. Apart from this the team also focuses majorly on school engagement and youth participation because of the nature of the community. For that we use various methods to make it more participative and interesting like various lesson plan.

Engagement team also focuses on team spirit and engaging community people in any activity they plan. Community visits, door to door visits as well as going on lunch and snacks party are also a part of the team to build rapport and connections with the people by attending these informal meetings.

The engagement team conducts group discussions for feedback about the product, involvement in prominent events like farmers’ class, immunization camp, eye camp, and connecting through ASHA workers. Apart from this the team made regular visits to the school to engage students from secondary classes. Several ice breakers, lesson plans and activities were created to address the issues of water conservation, contamination, and water crisis in the classroom setup. The school students were trained to work together in collecting stories around water from the community and creating grassroots comics. Students created posters that portrayed similar issues and were put up at several prominent places within the village and school premises. This involved pictorial representations of water crisis, slogans, and simple solutions that could be worked around water conservation and safety. The students also prepared a street play which involved selecting the issue, writing the script, preparing the characters and conducting the play at multiple locations in the village. Alongside, the team used a few Bollywood songs to recreate the lyrics around water. These songs were then recorded in a professional studio. Overall the community engagement team of tavelagarhi focuses not only spreading awareness and building up skills about the issues but also makes sustainable relations with the community members.

Empathy

Describe your various processes for collecting information. Summarize the results. Include some pictures. Include some specific demonstrative anecdotes.

Interviews

Summarize the various interviews and interview processes that you utilized.

Community meetings

Summarize the various community meetings and and meeting processes that you utilized.

Observations

Summarize the various observations and and observations processes that you utilized. Feel free to add or subtract subheadings under empathy as needed.

Literature Review

Community engagement is a very broad term that can have a very different meaning based on different contexts, organizations or industries.There are many terms used under community engagement team these are:

  • Public engagement - Public engagement involves the "process that brings people together to address issues of common importance, to solve shared problems, and to bring about positive social change.
  • Civic engagement - Civic engagement includes both paid and unpaid forms of political activism, environmentalism, and community and national service. Volunteering, national service, and service-learning are all forms of civic engagement.
  • Community consultation - Community consultation usually occurs when the public is asked for an opinion about an upcoming, current or past issues.

Community engagement and mobilisation includes

  • Plan for the long-term
  • Identify community priorities
  • Map community priorities and identify community leaders through community assessments
  • Hold preliminary meetings with community leaders and enlist their support to mobilize community participation
  • Hold community meetings to elect local representation to coordinate program activities
  • Design projects
  • Mobilize resource investments and
  • implement community development projects

Definition

Problem statement

The objective of the program is to asess the needs, and priorities of the community in relation to social and environments and to initiate social entrepreneurship activities in tavelagarhi while working on environmental issues.

The vision of the program is to see behavioral change in people for social and environmental issues and create social entrepreneurship using the existing resources in the community by engaging all the stakeholders of the community by using different extension methods to combat problems of water wastage and water contamination and encourage safe water storage practices.

Criteria

This table includes criteria for both community and school engagement, which was according to its own needs to be addressed. Include a brief intro to the criteria and then include a table with constraints and weights (0-10 highest). Edit the code below to make your table.

Community and School Engagement

Criteria Constraints Weight (0-10)
Behavior Change
  • ≥80 people change their water conservation practices (10 weeks project period)
  • ≥80 people change their safe water storage practices (10 weeks project period)
9
Awareness
  • ≥ 650 community members learned about water conservation and safe water storage (10 weeks project period)
  • The community core team members will continue to educate ≥ 5 schools in their community and nearby communities.
10
Community Participation
  • ≥ 100 community members participated in providing information, feedback, and designing engagement tools.
10
Communication
  • Use ≥ 10 different communication tools (i.e., posters, comics, skit, rally, education fair, songs, community videos, e-

rickshaw announcements, slogans, community visits) to engage community members

  • Consistency of messages (i.e., water conservation and safe water storage) through all communication tools.
  • Persistence in communication (10 weeks during the project period and every other week after the project period)
10
Sustainability/Extension
  • Students’ team will transfer technology and leadership to ≥ 10 community core team members including adults and children.
  • ≥ 10 community core team members including adults and children will continue to extend the activities related to water conservation and safe water storage.
  • ≥400 people change their water conservation practices (in a year)
  • ≥400 people change their safe water storage practices (in a year)
  • ≥ 1500 community members would learn about water conservation and safe water storage (in a year)
10

Ideation

1. Interviews: In depth interviews with community members and door to door informal visits helped in generating ideas about what work should be done and how should it be done. Interviews initiated the idea generation process and created a link to work on: After interviewing following observations were made:

1. realized the needs and priorities of community member

2. water conservation was the main issue to be worked upon

3. understood the caste dynamics and gender aspects of the community which helped in preparing our activities and plans/visits according to the structure.

2. Brainstorming: Brainstorming various times among team members lead to many ideas. pPior to every activity team members brainstormed and worked collaboratively to highlight the importance in what message we would want to convey, such as awareness, water conservation and the product team's "tap system". Brainstorming also took place when determining the different forms of outlets (posters, skit, video etc.) to be portrayed in the community. After Brainstorming following things were finalized for most of the activity:

1. All the activities which would be conducted in school would be in Hindi.

2. No complex sentences would be formed.

3. Prototyping: "everything is a prototype". Before finalizing any activity/tool, it went through a lot of discussion among team members and with every discussion, layout of prototype was improved.


4. Desk Research/Secondary data Research: Secondary data research for various activities helped a lot in ideation process. Team "tree huggers" did an online course on "Household water treatment and storage". This course helped in building ideas for product team a lot and gave content to engagement team to use in other activities. Secondary data research was also done to finalize lesson plans which was used as ice breaking activities in school engagement and these lesson plans would be given to faculty of school so that they could use these to teach students about environmental issues.


4. Personal Assignments: Prior to initial beginning of community engagement whole completed personal assignment that pertained to "properties of elements" & effects of some elements and processes on environment". Team members also did personal reflections on a daily basis in which team facts and personal facts were covered. In personal facts, members had to cover 3 things that they learnt that day, 2 things that they would like to apply in their lives and 1 thing they would like to learn more about. This personal reflection helped in keeping a record and led to generation of ideas for coming days based on prior experience and facts.

Prototyping

The function of these prototypes were for them to serve as an outlet to spread awareness, advocate positive behavior change, encourage participation in our mission for water conservation and to promote safe water storage and the product teams "tap" system. The desire of these prototypes was to eliminate the oblivious knowledge of the water crisis and highlight the possibilities of alternative water uses that will encourage behavior change.

Comics

The prototype for these comics began in Netaji, where students were asked to draw up a comic based on ways to save water, how water is wasted, how to practice safe water storage, the benefits of implementing the “tap system” and some of the student’s mother’s story of them dealing with water in their household.

The results of this prototype came to provide a motive to start a compilation of these students stories that will be made into a book for their school library.

Posters

In this section of prototyping, we aimed to use the posters as a a visual representation of the product teams efforts in promoting the need for the tap system in order to have a safe water storage system, how water can be easily contaminated when using the cup method of collecting water and how germs are present on hands and can be transferred into water. Other posters that were created emphasized the importance of water conservation and reducing water wastage. The questions we were hoping to answer were what the need for a safe water storage system is of importance and what was the focus of our project, spreading awareness.

The results of these prototypes were positive in the way that they generated community interest and engagement, provide the community with an idea of the purpose of this project, displayed the effects of water contamination, water conservation and the “tap system”.

Skit

The purpose of this skit was to show how not conserving water can become an even bigger issue and harsh reality that will affect Indian traditions, relations and priorities. The skit portrayed the differences between the present time, 2018, and the year 2030. In the year 2018 a person is using water in a wasting manner that results in a girl telling the individual that water is being wasted from that action, the girl is then scolded and told she knows nothing for saying that the water should be saved. In the year 2030, a young man is looking for a partner but because he is from a village that is suffering from water scarcity, no one wants to marry him. In the skit, the differences you would see in current Indian traditions are noticed when they do not Serb water or use it very scarcely. The moral of the skit is to convey the message that if you do not take precautions, work together or think about the consequences of water water wastage, conditions will worsen and impac society as a whole. The skit also included songs that were derived from local, popular Bollywood movies but the lyrics were changed.

After many practices of the skit, the enjoyable performance proved to be entertaining, funny and a good message of the importance of water conservation.

Activites

The purpose of these activities was to have children be interested in learning about water conservation, safe water storage and other water facts. The prototype of the puzzle was intended to show various ways to save water around the house, in the terms of the local knowledge and community resemblance. The Hindi writing hints to turn off the tap when not using a sink or tap, to use buckets when cleaning their animals instead of a hose and to practice rain water catchment. The puzzle, once drawn up, was cut into squares to make it age-appropriate for most of the audience that will test the puzzle at the education fair. The next game, “Water Saver”, was intended to be easy and quick to play, as well as fun and educational. The game has water droplet shapes in eight tiles, each being representative of a card that would then be picked up and answered to a question about water conservation. “Water City” is another game is based on the local popular game “Snakes and Ladders” that mainly focuses onwater but is mostly about facts. In this game the objective is to be the first to reach the 100 mark while trying to avoid the water slides. There is 20 water droplet shapes on various squares that are linked to a card with a fact of water conservation, safe water storage or about facts that include water in India (i.e.the percentage of water that is drinkable). The prototyping for models was conducted at the school where children were encouraged to work in a direction towards water harvesting, present water conditions or preventing water wastage.

The results of the prototypes were proven to be successful due to their high interest with each activity.

Tests

Culmination of events that took place in the community were the rally and education fair. Both events were intended to either notify the community about the upcoming education fair, perform an informative skit about the possible future without water, advocate the product teams efforts in safe water storage awareness and to educate both adults and children.

Rally

The rally was intended to practice and perform the skit, as well as notify the community of the upcoming education fair. We also took this opportunity to display the focus of safe water storage and promoting the “tap system”.

Education Fair

The education fair was a final team product that was made to educate the community on water safety, water conservation, safe water storage and of course, the importance of the product teams “tap system”. During the fair, we aimed to engage children through educational games in a game and activities booth that was water-based, as well as other community members through other various booths. The education fair included a booth of models made by the students of Netaji that displayed the present condition of the rivers with pollution, rainwater harvesting, and water conservation. A pledge booth was also there to represent each community members commitment to not waste water, always conserve by turning off the tap and other practices, as well as share this knowledge with others. This booth included having them sign the pledge banne, which would in turn give those who signed the banner a bracelet with a water drop to represent the pledge they had taken. Another booth that was in the fair was the safe storage/product booth, where the products of safe storage that featured the “tap system” were featured, along with a game that highlighted the importance of having closed containers to store water to prevent contamination. Another booth that was featured in the fair was a video booth; this booth included a compilation of videos that was of feedback from local community member’s personal experiences with water.

Timeline

Introduce the timeline and include a table of the timeline. Briefly describe what you did each day. Alternatively, this could be a link to a google spreadsheet as long as it is one that will not go away (i.e. it should probably be shared via Meenal or Lonny.

Conclusion

Describe your tangible findings.

Instructions

This is how to make, use and/or maintain it. The step by step how to template {{How to}} is most likely best for this part as shown below:

File:IMAGENAME.JPG
How to Do Something

Troubleshooting

This is only how to troubleshoot basic operation. For complex issues, the solution might just say contact ________. In addition, this might not be relevant to your project... if that is the case, just delete this section. It should be a table in this format:

Problem Suggestion
Example issue Example solution or suggestion
Does not turn on Make sure it is plugged in
Another issue Et cetera

Discussion

Discuss your findings through your own lenses. Summarize and editorialize. These can be more subjective, just make that clear.

Lessons learned

Describe your collective lessons learned in the project.... most likely in a numbered bullet format as shown below:

  1. Check in with your team daily
  2. Address communications issues early
  3. When inventing a widget, make sure that widget doesn't already exist in the local store
  4. Etc.

Next steps

Discuss any next steps for the project as it goes on into the future.

Team

Introduce team member name in the following format:

References

Template:Reflist

Make sure to include other relevant categories at the bottom, e.g. [[Category:Rainater]], [[Category:Upcycling]], etc.

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