Learning, Unlearning and Relearning

The journey begins from framing the statement of purpose to keep your thoughts, prospective and understanding of the core theme along with your past professional and personal experiences. How you groomed in a competitive environment of running fast to achieve your dream while keeping side your fun moments. For baking your future bright sometime, you just lost the zeal of enthusiasm and confidence. For a new beginner in professional setup after finishing school worrying of working culture is a huge concern just like the survival of fittest. At this stage the world, which seems once attractive looks strange. Our engagement with work and social horizon suddenly burdened with the roles and responsibility of job requirement.

The concepts of theory in the classroom become a huge puzzle how to apply those learning in the filed practice. The best part was; when you came out from your comfort zone, you learned many things to implement your thoughts on the ground reality. At this moment you realize your real strength and weaknesses. But, one thing you must keep in mind that; there are ways to solve those issues. You just need a small push in the right direction. Sometimes what we expect to do on the grassroot level didn’t work. This also made us sad and reduces our confidence. There were no shortcuts but putting constant regular efforts made your path easy. Every place and community have their own culture and diversity. We should respect them and trying to inculcate without biases helped in gaining the trust of community. During my whole 2 years fellowship journey I learn, unlearn and relearn many things, which help me to grow personally and professionally in my life.

My journey from the medical background to social and development sector was very interesting and I still need to deep dive more. Earlier I was working under different health programmes and institution during my academic and internship. Working at tertiary care hospital experience was very monotonous. The duties, roles and responsibilities were earlier decided and you need to follow them. During COVID-19 pandemic some of the issues which made me to think deep likely on social and economic parameter of a family. As, I was working with covid hospital and staffs. Here my personal observation was that sometimes really after taking all your preventive measures against causative agents you prone to suffer from specific diseases and its effects. All the team of medical staffs give their best to save the life of many patients but some patients still didn’t make that. Some posting at rural and urban primary/community health center was a huge turning of my professional understanding. Here I was working with medical social workers and few psychology interns. And during our free duty hours they shared their experiences about grassroot level. We need to figure out the how healthcare facilities reached there with good quality and adequate human resources. The government health programmes are still going on but the beneficiary faced may hurdle and unaware about the proper information and channel to avail the facility. Some NGOs, and civil society worked parallelly to support the government health program to reach at the last corner of society and they succeeded too. Community participation to bring change and youth participation also required to bring development and build healthy environment. The option of volunteerism also motivated youngster now a days. These all things attracted me to work at grassroot level to contribute my learning and opportunity to start from the scratch. 

Unlearning and relearning phase of My journey moving ahead under JSW Foundation Fellowship as a fellow from the initial orientation cum induction training at Pune- Tuljapur- Mumbai. In the training time I got to learn many new tools like- Participatory Rural Appraisal, Stakeholder engagement and importance, tools for project designing and management, Logical Framework Analysis, leaky bucket concept, designing own corporate dictionary, design thinking, system thinking, story telling, and more. Due to diverse co-fellows from different stakes and educational background in the cohort, I got to learn different perspective or vision to looking the community issues, challenges and ideas to solve those challenges. All the fellows were allotted different location at different stakes. The location allotted to me was jawhar at district Palghar, Maharashtra.  

During the early days at jawhar while deciding the project and choosing village community was a challenging task. But tools like- PRA, community need assessment played a key role including project mentor guide and support provided from the fellowship team. Motivation and regular co-operation from Co-fellow Mr. Vivek Shahare at the same project location also played a key role in the complete journey of my fellowship.

Unlearning past lessons and relearning new things after conduction of multiple training and coming back to the project location- Jawhar opened a door for me to see the community and its issues from other perspective like- social, economic and cultural etc. During my whole fellowship journey team iVolunteer played a pivotal role to teach me about the various tools needed while designing a project. other things which i learned includes use of story telling, gameathon, Corporate dictionary, learning from peer group and other project management tools etc.