A Community of those who were Denied: Vanika’s changemaker journey

This story was written by Vanika and edited for length and clarity. 

Since I was a child, I had a keen interest in art; and gradually, I began looking for a platform where I can share my art with the rest of the world. Later, I came across YouTube, and I started a channel. As my idea for a YouTube channel grew and developed, I realized that beyond four walls of our classrooms; other students at my school were equally passionate about sharing their art with a greater audience. So, together we began to work on our channel. While shooting our introductory video for our YouTube channel, I had discovered a new passion for building community through art. That is why I, along with my team, decided to create an art-based community for people who are socially disadvantaged, or denied. To match our intention, we named our community Denied.

We began our work by conducting art-based events around the city. Throughout our events and interaction with different kids; I, along with two of my team members, realized that art is not just an effective medium for forming community, but it can also become a space for collaborative education. Inspired by our new direction, we started a project called The Street Shikshaa (TSS). Initially, our work began with a small team of 10-15 volunteers in Jaipur, and later expanded to a larger team in Mumbai. The TSS project was aimed at creating a space for passionate volunteers and community members to try their hand at teaching through art. We transformed conventional educational subjects, like mathematics and science, into art activities for children in our communities that lack access to quality education. In TSS classrooms, volunteers are able to pursue their own creative lesson-planning and encourage kids to pursue creative thinking, by designing out-of-the-box lessons. For instance, our volunteers help kids learn about sustainable development through a game of treasure hunt.
  
The initial success of TSS’s Mumbai chapter found a place in the blogs of Humans of Bombay, a highly followed social media channel, which helped our organization to form new connections across five different cities. By March 2020, TSS was operational in seven cities, and had impacted over 5000+ kids. 
 
Though COVID-19 Pandemic created enormous challenges to our work, I continue to hold a mantra dear to my heart- “in problems we find opportunities”. While we could not continue TSS in-person, we found a new possibility of working on arts based education of the elderly. Interacting with my own grandma and understanding her struggle made me curious - what if we create a peer community for elderly and middle-aged adults, so that they can keep learning and growing amongst friends? This idea motivated us to create a digital school for mothers and grandmothers, in which we curated workshops that helped them learn about technology, health, and many other relevant subjects that could help them in their daily lives. In these virtual classrooms, mothers and grandmothers could come together to discuss their passions and learn from one another. Although COVID-19 made part of our valuable work impossible, it also pushed us to keep innovating and thinking in ways that led to more lasting, credible solutions.

Throughout my journey, I have had the opportunity to build community through art and through virtual education. What has remained core to my approach is: open mind and open heart. When I began my work, I was willing to recognize the possibility of working directly with kids, and building community through educational art. By remaining open-minded, I later found a new path towards change through virtual community building for the elderly. Although my changemaker journey has had its unexpected twists, turns, and challenges, I continue to cultivate an openness to change, welcoming new possibilities from every avenue.