Out of India

Recently I returned from a journey that left me different than how it found me. Unlike much of my travel, this trip was not prompted by design. As a member of the board of directors for Mona Foundation, I traveled to India to visit the schools that it partners with there. Mona Foundation supports grassroots initiatives that provide education to all children and increases opportunities for women and girls in some of the most impossible places on the planet. In its completely unique way Mona partners with these schools to help them develop into juggernauts capable of transforming their communities. So from Delhi to Lucknow, then to Indore and remote villages - days by car deep into the countryside, my friends and I journeyed to see first-hand the schools, programs, people and places that are being impacted by Mona’s support.

For context, India is 1/3 the geographic size of the US, but it is home to 1.4 billion as compared to the US at 327 million. Poverty, pollution, and inequality on almost every front are stifling.

Here is what Dr. Urvashi Sahni, founder of Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF) - Mona’s partner project in Lucknow, has quoted in many of her presentations on India’s daughters, including her Ted Talk in India:  

 •    “50% of the girls in India do not want to be girls.

•    India’s daughters are unsafe, unwanted, unequal and unfree. 

•    Two rapes reported each hour – India is the rape capital of the world.

•    1/3 of the world’s child brides, I call them child slaves, are in India, 5 M girls.

•    Almost 1M girls are killed in the womb each year through selective termination.

•    And 50% of married women report domestic violence.  Probably the rates are much higher.”

It is against this backdrop that the schools Mona supports here are being established with  curricula developed to reimagine a new cultural norm for girls as well as boys. 

SHEF is just one of eighteen remarkable institutions that Mona partners with around the world. It reaches millions of children in India through a portfolio of programs including a technology arm where their video lessons are available on YouTube, a girl’s empowerment program that uses a feminist, rights-based pedagogy and non-formal education centers or “GyanSetus” set up in urban and rural slums to reach children that would otherwise have no access to education. 

Every one of SHEF’s programs deeply impressed me, however it was the visits to the GyanSetus which were perhaps the most indelible. Like sanctuaries immersed in wastelands of desperation we came upon these little buildings - filled with children singing and enthusiastically engaged in their lessons. Before our eyes we saw the reality of their condition lift and hope rush in. 

We ended our 10 day trek across India in Agra to see the obligatory Taj Mahal. Standing there at dawn, witnessing its white marble set aglow by the rising sun, I couldn’t help but compare this remarkable human achievement to the achievements of the people I had just met and the monuments they are building, both literally and figuratively, to implement widespread change in the structures of their society. 

If you’d like to know more about Mona Foundation www.monafoundation.org or even accompany me on my next visit to one of it’s remarkable projects, please let me know in the comments below.

Here’s to Creating Noble Spaces along all of our journeys!  ~ XO