Our work overarching spans the domains of education, livelihood develoment, rural institution development, and, peace building. As the development of our website is not nearly as complete or rich as the innumerable details of our work, we offer in this page a terse overview while also inviting the reader to our repository of Reports & Journals containing highlights as well as deep writing & our CV that notes various awards & recognitions, references in external media & publications, as well as other websites & blogs.
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​Selenghat Valley School
Selenghat Valley School has been the fountainhead for our vision and, as such, is built & run entirely by our rural community to deeply explore & develop the model for education as freedom, and in the process also for larger development as freedom.
This school started in 2020 with 79 children in grades Nursery to UKG and has grown to 160 children from Nursery to Class 5, and it planned to add a new class each year till class 12. -
Govt School Collaboration
Gradually, after setting the precedent for such a vision for education and a community school, and developing related capacity and building trust in our community, the experiences of our community school has been becoming a basis to collaborate with the larger education ecosystem, where we are currently working with 7 Lower Primary Schools/Anganwadi centers in a systematic collaborative effort towards the same vision of education as freedom.
​Emerging deeply interconnected from our fountainhead-effort in education is our work in livelihood development where we are exploring a diverse landscape based on the broad socio-economic-political realms of life towards alternate & new livelihood development, especially in the context of the tea-plantations of Assam. Key current efforts include:
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Oyster Mushroom Cultivation
We have developed a revenue-generating livelihood model based on oyster mushroom cultivation and which in various ways is being taken up by our community, in private entrepreneurship & smaller-farmer models to attempts to engage larger collectives, for example women organized in SHGs -
Self Help Groups (SHGs)
To empower women as individuals and as collectives towards social issues, empowered participation in local governance, and generating new economic activities. -
Government Collaboration
Here too, we are collaborating with the government, for example with the Assam State Rural Livelihood Mission (ASRLM). -
New Livelihoods through our Community School & Organization
And, last but not the least, the very process of creating our school & organization from the ground-up has already created numerous & diverse jobs in our community, and which will be discussed more deeply in Rural Institution Development & Capacity Building.
Our organization is the basis for all our work and is growing deeply rooted in our community, which includes the great work of building all its capacity spanning soft systems & processes to hard infrastructure from the ground-up rooted in our rural-agrarian-traditional to forest-dwelling-tribal culture but while developing balance with emergent modern cultural compliant systems & processes.
As such it is creating new livelihood opportunities for youth in our community, who were otherwise unemployed, to rise up & meet the challenges of becoming such a traditionally rooted~balanced modern compliant organization, but while remaining grounded & balanced with our traditional roots. Following are but some examples of the different streams in which our community is developing:
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Teachers
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Administrators, Accountants, Managers & Executives with knowledge of modern systems of Governance, Finance & Accounts, HR, Compliances etc
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Program & Project Leaders & Staff to spearhead various initiatives
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Construction Workers & Artists: Balance/upskilling indigenous & local wisdom & resources based techniques with emergent modern knowledge & techniques
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Last, but not the least, as compassionate problem-solving leaders of this great process grounding their leadership in practical peaceful frameworks
By developing loving compassion as a core-practical organizational wisdom & skill and making it coherent with aspects of linear programmatic development to non-linear frameworks & unanalyzable experiential wisdom of living & moving at the rate of a culture of a people & a planet, we are crafting our own version of practical peaceful frameworks for development. Following are a few emergent fruits & practices:
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Encountering Deep Conflicts & Responding Peacefully
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Compassionate Problem-Solving Leadership
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Wellbeing of Individuals ~ Earth
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Exploring & Developing Sustainable Construction
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Waste Management & Recycling
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Water & Energy Conservation
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Conserving & Nurturing Biodiversity