Teaching India's Poorest, and Herself
(Profile of a delegate to the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship)
By Andrzej Zwaniecki
Staff Writer
Washington - A Mumbai slum was an exotic place to 18-year-old Shaheen Mistri when she walked into it in 1989 as part of a college project. Born into an upper-middle-class Indian family, she spent most of her early youth overseas studying at private schools and colleges. She was not naïve: she knew about inequalities in India's education system. But what she saw - bright kids full of potential living in terrible squalor - shocked her.
Within a few days, she found a small space in a private home in a shantytown and began teaching a small group of children of different ages. She didn't speak the same language, but it was the least of the obstacles she faced. There was no money for pens. Children were not interested. Parents didn't trust her. And potential sponsors couldn't understand why she wanted to bring these poor children into private schools. But Mistri couldn't be deterred from teaching. She was able to move into her first real classroom when the Catholic Holy Name School gave her space, after 20 others had rejected her pleas to host her group.
"If you have a lot of drive and determination, nothing seems formidable or challenging," Mistri said. But, she added, even after she had a classroom, she had no idea what might come of her effort to teach kids from the slum.
What has become of it is the Akanksha Foundation , a nonprofit education project that provides after-school tutoring to disadvantaged children at more than 60 centers and formal education at six schools. The centers and schools are in Mumbai and Pune. Volunteers, mostly college students, teach close to 5,000 children using an innovative methodology, which won the foundation international honors. Akanksha means "aspiration" in Hindi. Fittingly, Akanksha alumni go to colleges or vocational schools. Some stay with the organization as teaching fellows. One, Sumeet, has become an MTV India celebrity.
As the recognition of Akanksha and Mistri herself grew and success stories piled on, she had a nagging sense of disparity between the magnitude of problems that plague India's education system and the contribution her organization could make to solve them. But she saw an opportunity to expand her reach and work for more transformative changes when she met Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America . The U.S. program recruits and trains outstanding recent college graduates, who commit to teach for two years in U.S. public schools.
The challenge of transplanting the concept to a system as complex and diverse as India's (eight languages are accepted for school instruction) is tremendous. But Mistri and her associates working for educational reform forged ahead unfazed. They launched Teach for India in 2007, after which the organization recruited around 240 teaching fellows and wooed Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and major Indian corporations as sponsors. Mistri hopes the nonprofit will grow into a national movement, which eventually will bring about educational reform.
"When I started it was basically an attempt to learn about myself," she reflected. Today, she is a successful advocate for better education. She has learned much, she says, over the past 20 years, particularly about children's emotional generosity, perseverance and courage.
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