Change the Script 2024
Anjali (name changed) joined Dream a Dream’s Career Connect program in 2015. Being shy and confused we first offered her a life-skills development program to give her a foundation of problem solving and decision-making skills that she would have missed developing during her growing up years. Post the 30-day program began a long journey for her to discover who she wanted to be and what career she wanted to pursue. As with all young people who come to Dream a Dream, we offered her a myriad of experiences so she could discover where her passions lie. She explored fashion-designing, tally, photography, yoga and many others. But it was a chance session on baking that one of our volunteers offered that changed her life and she decided she wanted to be a baker. We again helped her gain the skills and expertise needed, and she was able to land a job as a pastry chef in Ritz Carlton.
What a great story of success for us, and for her. But today, as we continue to stay in touch with her (as with over 10,000 other alumni of our programs), we can see that these moments of success are not the whole story. As soon as COVID hit, she was laid off from Ritz Carlton. A year of financial struggle followed culminating in the passing of her father due to lack of adequate medical care during COVID. The expected norm being that every household must have a male ‘head’, she decided to get married, instead of pursuing a career option in Mangalore with a well-established pastry chef. And while the husband is supportive and kind, today she bakes as a home-chef fulfilling custom orders for people in her neighborhood.
How do we define ‘success’ in this case? While we are proud of her ability to handle these difficult life-circumstances with courage and clarity, I wonder what might have been possible if she had not had to face such extreme losses due to systemic inadequacies? As we grappled with how the employment, healthcare, economic and patriarchal systems of our society changed the trajectory of her life, we ask ourselves, are life-skills enough?
The answer is a resounding ‘no’. Beyond young people’s personal resilience, grit and capacity, what is needed for them to thrive is compassion and empathy in a just and equitable world. Unless we, as society and systems, can hold ourselves to higher standards of equity and inclusion, just empowering young people with transformative life-skills is not enough. To ensure that they are not constantly up against the same systemic barriers that prevent them from thriving, we must also be willing to transform. We must be willing to create a society, where the onus of success is not only on the young people, but on all of us who make up the ecosystems around these young people. We must be willing to redefine success to be more equitable and inclusive, so that all young people can thrive.
While creating a mindset shift in young people and teachers about their own agency and creativity (which was our work for the first 2 decades), was a mammoth undertaking, creating a mindset shift in the system is many folds more complex. When I think about my own biases, due to my upper-caste, heterosexual, able-bodied social identity, it was a tough reckoning for me to accept all that must be happening in the shadow of that. One story that brought it home for me was a young man in our program who after overcoming unsurmountable challenges linked to abandonment and lack of self-esteem was able to find a partner, settle down and have a child. However, when congratulating him on the new chapter of his life, he very nonchalantly informed me that he has instructed his wife to quit her career and stay at home to take care of their son. That is when it occurred to me, that we had failed to incorporate in our programs the critical self-reflection that would have allowed this young couple to explore various choices that could be possible in this situation rather than accepting age-old patriarchal norms as given. And in not equipping our young people to reflect on their own systems of privilege, I had also let myself and Dream a Dream off the hook, from reflecting on our systems of privilege.
This upheaval was further deepened when I visited a government school in North India where we had helped to conceptualize and implement a social-emotional-learning based curriculum. The teacher shared a story of a man who was shunned by a learned guru for living in a house with 99 extra rooms. The teacher confidently asked the children what they learnt from the story and the students promptly responded, “greed is bad”. ‘Greed’, a complex nuanced emotion that we had hoped children would develop the critical thinking and self-awareness to unpack for themselves based on their lived experiences, was replaced as a moral imperative that the children had to avoid, to be considered ‘good’. Again, while I was proud of our work in supporting 6 states across the country to introduce SEL-based programs in government schools, the question came back to me. What was I missing, for us to have been co-opted like this?
Coming out of her reflections on the struggle of black women to have equality in both the suffragette and the civil rights movement, Kimberle Crenshaw provided the following definition of intersectionality: “Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking.” When we add the intersectionality of the systems of privilege that each one of us encompasses in our social identities the problem can seem impossible to untangle.
We, at Dream a Dream, have pondered on this conundrum for the past few years. And we have come to understand that if we can apply the same principles of transformative experiences that we built our expertise in over the last 25 years — but in a different paradigm — there is a possibility for this change to happen in society at large. It starts with me as the CEO, being willing to hold myself to account, and confront my own intersections of oppression as a woman and of systemic power as an english-speaking, college-educated, urban person in a position of authority. It involves Dream a Dream’s ability to hold spaces for its employees by accounting for their intersectional identities. Finally, it plays out in our ability to hold and convene spaces in the ecosystem, where we could all come together and safely explore all aspects of who we are. Without victimizing, blaming, or shaming, a space where paradoxes are possible. Where each one of us is whole and complete as we are but are also held in a community to seek that place inside of us where we are incomplete and flawed and have a chance to reflect and reckon.
To take on a mission like this we would need a community willing to look beyond the attributable outcomes of social change as we have come to define them today. Partners who are willing to walk this journey with us of creativity, love, empathy as well as of reckoning and reflection. We invite you to join us in this endeavor to create a thriving world together where our success is measured not by our ability to get somewhere, but simply by our ability to walk together.
