About Together We Build in Surat, Surat

According to the report by Montreal-based UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Global Education Monitoring, India has 47 million youth of secondary and higher secondary school-going age dropping out of school.

Most subjects currently taught in the secondary/higher secondary segment prepare students for higher education, as opposed to the world of work. Our children are not taught to deal with the changes happening in the world that is increasingly frantic, unpredictable and complex. Top ten jobs right now, didn’t exist way back in 2005. With adversities and unpreparedness of life, young people from vulnerable background struggle to succeed in their life.

Equipping school students with employability skills addresses this gap and has the potential to alter their future. Unfortunately our schools are failing to provide students employability skills to achieve their long term career outcomes.

Most of the employability skill development programs are vocational training based and for graduates who are considered as “market ready”. We believe in the long run, early shaping of the human capital can ensure the country’s economic boost and thus requires implementation of skill based education at schools.

Our solution is to conduct a near-peer and full circle entrepreneurship mentoring after-school programme for secondary school students is a mix of theoretical and experiential learning methods.

We deliver a 90 minute session for children per week through our community youth mentors over the course of an academic year.
The curriculum is of two stage process:
i.Venture creation
ii.Growth and Business management
The project-based experiential learning provides the children practical wisdom to deal with the challenges in their life.

The centre of our approach is child. We are teaching employability skills to our children who are in secondary/higher secondary school. While our children launch start-ups and earn revenue, they create businesses solely to practice and develop the habits to achieve their goals and definitions of success.
Children from low-income communities face many challenges and barriers that business creation skills alone simply cannot adequately assist with. Our children are acquiring mentors and building support systems from their communities, learning skills and adopting habits for their life’s success.

Our approach of channelizing the youth from the same communities for delivering our program is sustainable by paving way for dialogues in the community regarding the education and empowerment of children and youth. Selection of youth from the same communities helps us to make the youth more empathetic towards the children. We believe in building a community of change makers by uplifting the underprivileged children with the help of underprivileged youth from the same community have an effect of exponential empowerment.

While being a mentor, our youth not only receive initial training, but also ongoing coaching which prepares them for success in their career endeavours.

We work on a strong collaborative approach with local public and private schools and communities by making them aware about the challenges caused by the lack of social structures to support the need of children, and deploying the youth to step out and support the children for both of them to break the stereotypes and claim dignity to the place where they belong to.