I have been involved with Los Angeles chapter of Association for India’s Development (AID)(www.aidindia.org). I started working for AID-LA after i came to US. Early on, it was because I missed India and my family and wanted to work something for social cause of my country. It was a little frustrating in the beginning as there were not many people who were interested and moving forward was difficult with my busy school schedule as well. Through the next couple of years, I got more exposure to diverse social issues, learnt from experiences of other volunteers, from people with whom we collaborate in India, through discussions with core people of the organization – learning about their thoughts and ideologies and slowly participating and contributing towards discussions on different social issues. Each new experience got me more interested in this direction and helped in developing an opinion on some of these issues that I can now confidently discuss.
During the last year, with concentrated efforts of several dedicated volunteers we got a lot more new volunteers who want to associate and work for grassroot projects in India. As overall project coordinator and one of the oldest volunteer with this chapter, I tried to contribute my efforts towards general administration, role assignment, project selection, project review and coordinating talks of several people working in India for a direct exposure of the chapter volunteers to real experiences. Over the last couple of months, I realized that with the increasing size of our group, we need to put in place certain guidelines and processes to make the functioning more streamlined and easier for a new person to join and start contributing effectively as soon as possible. In this direction, I aim to direct the efforts towards setting up these processes over the next month or so and ensure that all the new volunteers who joined feel a sense of responsibility and have a specific set of tasks to perform. I also plan to expose them to the several ways in which they can learn and participate effectively not just at the chapter level but at the central AID level – discussing and learning about issues at central forum, taking up coordinating positions at the central level, collaboration with other organizations at UCLA and LA in general on global issues, invite more speakers working at grassroot level to share their experiences, initiating discussion threads on the current hot issues in environment and social change and sharing my learnings from this class and the class on “Leaders in sustainability”
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