It’s been 11 years now working in the education sector. I worked with children age 3yrs to 18yrs. Schools from state board to IB boards. Homeschooling groups and alternative schools too..

for the last few years I got interested in working with teenagers or youth.

• How to give a platform to youth to thrive ?
• How to give opportunities where they can build their agency
• how they can be self directed learner and foster life skills
• how they engage in local environment and civic problems

These are some of my goals when I say working with youth.

As a self -directed learner I saw that you need two very strong pillars to build your journey.

1. non judgmental safe space + mentor/friend/peers who can challenge you, give reflective tools to you. Basically your tribe, who trust you, believe in you no matter how good you are.

2. Exposure, Projects, Challenges, Things which helps you to shift your orbit These are the two main things which I believe are game changers. I saw multiple organizations working on the same design.

I want to spend the next 10 years of my life on this problem. What will be my intervention design ?

• can we design a program where children can do real life project
• where children can opportunity to think, work in team, find mentors and more

What should be the context ? Theme ?

Can we give the local environment and civic as a theme ? If you merge it all together :

Local khoji - a platform for children to conduct original and authentic inquiry projects about the cities they live in.

Children can different type of projects - research projects, making projects, story project rooted in place they live.

This will be a 3 to 4 month journey, according to how much time school / NGO / learning centers give to work on the project.

This program design is very much inspired by Solve Ninja (Reap Benefit) and City as lab - Mumbai (@cityaslabindia)

What happened after this intervention ? children who were involved in can start a club called ‘Khoji club’ which will become a incubator / Adda kind of place for children. There will be different events happening, reading - making - movie screening - talks and lots of fun.

I want to make the whole process open source so anybody can run local khoji and khoji clubs at their own place. And I want to focus on more innovative ideas. I don’t want to run as a typical NGO / org but more like a laboratory where I constantly work on ideas to re imagine learning.

#citizenscience #natureeducation #projectbasedlearning