The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

NavGurukul is about 10 months old now. We started our journey with a very simple question -

Can we train someone who has never properly used computers, doesn’t know English well enough to understand this email — learn programming and get a ​job in less than a year long course?​

Apart from a fundraiser that we did publicly, our entire focus was on working on the right product. With our students doing internships beyond our expectations, and moving forward, we wanted to take a break, and thank you for all your faith in us. There are miles to travel before we realise our vision of a World of abundance, where students have access to careers of their choice.

On this journey, it is important that we have an effective two-way communication. We have always believed that painting a rosy picture isn’t going to help anyone, and rather an approach where we can mention our successes as well as the vulnerabilities is important.

What’s better than us solving the problems that we are facing?

Folks like you who can help us with that.

So, here we are we the first set of the good, the bad, and the ugly. This will be a monthly ritual to maintain the discipline, while internally we share them on a weekly basis.

The Good

1. We launched our online platform — SARAL to enable eLearning for our students and others. The courses are available in Hindi.
2. Our students have started doing some amazing internships and freelancing projects. After two to three months from now, this will culminate into them joining these companies full-time.
3. We got covered in Times of India.
4. We just finished our NCore’s first week in Bangalore and are continously working with the mentors assigned to us to deliver better results.
5. We are privileged to have Anuradha join our team, and lead the curriculum development for English, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, etc. through activities.
6. We are now prepared to start a Girl’s only batch as we close the funds for the same.
7. We are in process of four different verticals that a student would be able to choose from.
8. One of our students is being trained as a facilitator, and can easily start another chapter of NavGurukul in any existing training center with our curriculum and help. This will help us validate our model to scale additionally with partners.
9. We have established a backbone of volunteers, who are helping us with various aspects like curriculum development, mentoring our students, etc.
10. Their is a very strong culture among students to help each other even when they are out and doing internships which tend to be quite hectic.

The Bad

1. There are two students who are struggling with getting reasonable opportunities. We have adjusted our admission criteria to set the threshold a little higher on the requirement of maths.
2. While we are working on our mobilisation strategy, but so far the process of being able to reach out to these candidates is time intensive. This will get even more challenging when we will start mobilising for Girls’ batch.
3. We are looking for a residential setup where we can accommodate about 60–80 people for our next batch. We have figured out some places in Noida. If there are better options available, we are happy to explore more.

The Ugly

1. While the learning is happening without a facilitator, and happening better than our expectations, there are issues we aren’t able to resolve well. Their are issues around waste management, cleaning and cooking that we need a better structure to solve. Students are expected to study for all days, and on an average spend one day a week working on these issues.
2. We need to put in more efforts to develop our curriculum and pedagogy further, but there is an unresolved conflict on how to use the donations — spend on product or towards training more students.

Thank you for reading through. Would love to discuss or brainstorm on any of these points.