From Lower Parel, my friend S and I asked the taxi-wala to take us to Kamathipura (Near Mumbai Central) - He gave a shocked look but drove us there without speaking much, but he refused to get inside the lane after reaching the entrance. We finally ended up walking through the slums to reach the 13th lane where the Chandramani Municipal school is located. Seems like the 15th lane is one of the most well known red-light areas in Mumbai. Chandramani school houses many social initiatives for the underprivileged children and youth from the near-by areas.
One such initiative is Smile foundation's STeP program (http://smilefoundationindia.org/e_learning.htm ), which is "an effort towards creating a pool of employable youth from the underprivileged section" Through the organization, we met a group of ~20 youth - Many of them were a bit shy and maybe low on confidence, but full of determination in their eyes to learn and get ahead in life. We decided to help in whatever small way possible. As many of them were in the age group of 18-22 and were doing / have done HSC / Bachelors, their major concern was "How can I get a decent job?"
For any job, 3 things are needed: Preparation, Provision and Presentation. How can we help those youth in these 3 areas? In our first interaction, we chose the "Presentation" esp. Interview and communications skills - We did a decent job with mock interviews, Dos and Don'ts of interviews etc. (Back at IIMs, when we had insane iterations of writing resumes, we used to crib "what a waste of time" - It's not a waste anymore: we hope that experience helps us develop resumes to make a difference to these youth)
Through future interactions, we are planning to join hands with Smile foundation to help the youth "prepare" for the job and "provide" them with relevant opportunities. These two depend a lot on the kind of job they are keen on taking up. When we asked "what kind of job do you want?", many of them were clueless, while few of them said "Retail management". One of the guys confidently said that he would like to work for the city center mall, which was just a km away from the school. I wasn't sure whether he is exposed to all kind of opportunities.
Just to repeat: the youth under consideration are are 18-22 years old with very basic English / computer skills. Many of them had studied commerce in their HSC. There are more women than men. Our challenge for the next interaction is to figure out the potential list of jobs / careers that these youth can aim for. Some of the ideas that popped up during our return journey were Retail, Restaurants, Malls, Accounting, Automobiles, Textiles etc. But traditional way of thinking is not be good enough! We need simple but smart new ideas.
You got an interesting one? Please share with me.
1 comment:
I think you should look at jobs which cater to the one strength which other people don't have: knowledge of their own community and social class.
If they could present themselves as people who understand their peers more than anybody sitting in corporate offices, they could get jobs as strategy/marketing analysts or something like that.
Just an idea.
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