Enlightened Expedition: A Journey to Practical Wisdom
The title might sound too dramatic at first sight but the feelings are completely conveyed. In this blog, I would like to share my experience working with an NGO to develop something practical that can be used by a community. Over this semester, I had the wonderful opportunity after taking a psychology elective called, Child and Adolescent Global Mental where we got the chance to work as groups with various organizations around the world. During this, I got the opportunity to work with a non-government organization, Ramakrishna Sarada Samiti (RKSS) which is in the slums of Mumbai, India to help the community gain access to knowledge and support in their daily lives.
Four of us from the class were working with RKSS and were in direct contact with the Chairperson and Executive Trustee of RKSS and 6 of her students in Mumbai as well. We were working with the team on learning about the people in this community, their perspective on Mental Health, their daily lifestyle, cultural and linguistic background. I also had a huge advantage in gaining knowledge and perspective from the three other psychology Master’s students with whom I worked on this project. With the additional advantage of me coming from India and my teammates and I knowing one of the spoken languages, Hindi, we were able to work on obtaining a deeper understanding of their community.
Through the semester, we started by meeting the team weekly, every Saturday morning EST which would be evening time in India. While learning about the community, we simultaneously were taught about Child and Adolescent mental health growth and impact in class. This was a huge shift for me but I enjoyed the class. Working with undergrad students in India, we got a new perspective on talking about our project outputs in a more fun and interactive manner.
In this project, we had two main interests, working with the women/ mothers who come to the NGO to attend sessions called Gappaghoshti which is a group knowledge transfer/ group therapy session conducted at RKSS at regular intervals. The second option was to work with the children in the community area where they have group sessions to provide awareness and help with educating children through programs like Balwadi. As the weeks went on, we planned to mainly focus on the mother. This might be confusing as the course is about children and adolescents. But mothers are the main support in this community for their children. So this kind of acts as an influence for the children as well when their parents are in good mental health and with awareness. We are also focusing on activities that can be used by mothers and children for our deliverables.
Coming to our deliverables, we planned to make a toolkit filled with multiple activities that can help with the mental health of the mother and child. We have 3 main components in the toolbox — a mindfulness tracker to bring awareness on topics for older women/mothers with the help of social media content; a game that can be helped as play therapy to help children and adults open up in regards to their health, issues, and life while playing; and a guide book which has the background information which administrators and social workers can use to refer for mental health issues. The game also comprises exercises to help the mind and body. With our team's knowledge varying from psychology to auditing and documentation and design and technology, we have taken this leap to produce products that use all the above backgrounds. Though all this seems a lot vague, we have been working on creating the deliverables and plan to pilot test and improve on them while giving them to the organization.
I feel this project and class has definitely helped me learn a lot of things from teamwork to practical work to learning about psychology and mental health and also ground me in my thought about India. I have had a truly wonderful and enlightening time working with everyone and have also been able to use my background knowledge and skills in design particularly game design and presentation. I look forward to finishing the deliverable and testing it out with the people to make sure they have a use for it.
