The young change makers

Under the Design for Change initiative, children are put in the driver's seat to get the best out of their environment

Kiran Bir Sethi was at her wits’ end with schooling in Ahmedabad. She struggled with how to get the best out of her young son without him losing interest in the schooling system. He often returned from school dejected and bored. 

Unlike most parents who either try changing schools or continue with whatever is on offer, even as they complain, Sethi had an unusual solution: she chose to set up her own IGCSE school — Riverside — in 2001.

A designer from National Institute of Design, Sethi decided to build an “experiential” school, breaking away from the traditional approach to schooling. Designers design with the users in mind, but children — who are the users of education — are never “consulted or considered” in the way education has developed. It was with this thought that the school evolved. 

Parents of a certain type are attracted to the school’s unconventional approach and it has around 400-odd students now. After the first three batches passed out, it became evident that the approach was working: the students were both “doing good and doing well (academically)”.

However, with Riverside, the whole approach would remain restricted to a limited number, whereas Sethi was convinced that putting children “in charge” could work for any child, anywhere. The idea was to let children lead and be the change. 

So in 2009, she and her team designed what has now become a movement — “Design for Change” — that would encourage children to identify a problem and then design a solution for it. Children are encouraged to “feel, imagine, do and share” —  feel for a problem or a challenge in your environment, imagine how you can change or improve it, make the actual change and share your story with others.

“The difference with Design for Change is that here we listen to what is bothering the child rather than telling the child what he should be bothered about,” says Sethi. It teaches them to take ownership and collaborate — both much needed in the real world.

Typical parenting in India often conveys a negative message or is more cautious than encouraging: “don’t do this, you will hurt yourself”, “don’t touch the animal, it will bite”, “don’t try this, you are too young”. The idea is to trust children to initiate and lead the change and not to discourage them from trying out new methods and approaches — a Western concept in thought. “As children, we grow up being told, ‘you can’t’. We want to reverse that to ‘you can’,” says Nandini Sood, a member of the Design for Change team.

Changes brought about range from small to large. At a school in Pune, children were unable to concentrate because they were uncomfortable sitting at short desks and benches designed for younger kids. Teachers were also annoyed at having to constantly tell the students to sit properly. The students decided to raise the height of their desks and covered their cost in part by selling craft items, such as lanterns, diyas and bookmarks, produced by them.

In 2015, in drought-prone Wardha in Maharashtra, the students of a local school — under the Design for Change programme — decided to build a dam. Students of Indira High School raised funds to construct a check dam near their school to address the lack of drinking water. The dam helped the villagers whose livelihoods depended on agriculture that needed adequate irrigation. With contribution from villagers, students were able to collect enough money over an entire month to construct a dam. 

Since it started, Design for Change has reached 8,500 schools across India. Almost 50 per cent of the schools lie in rural areas and the rest are in urban and semi-urban areas. They range from elite to rural government schools in remote districts of the country. 

Till now, schools and teachers in South India have embraced the programme with much greater ease than North India. In Tamil Nadu, the education department has been working closely with Design for Change for more than seven years now and has covered over 5,000 schools.

Design for Change sends out direct mailers and the entire week’s plan (like a how-to-do-it kit) to the schools that have agreed to participate in the programme. It also reaches out to schools by partnering with NGOs, which, in turn, take the material and encourage schools to try it out for themselves. The programme is not for profit and money is raised through donor organisations, high net worth individuals and organisations working in the education space. The team is now examining whether the entire movement can be transformed into a social enterprise.

To start with, there was a lot of resistance to the programme from even the teachers. “They would say, ‘how do we do this, it’s too tough to get the children to do this’ and so on,” says Sood. But after the initial hand-holding and when some changes became visible, teachers, too, became more receptive.

Above all, once a change happens — big or small — it wins over the biggest sceptics. And, it reinforces the belief that small changes can add up and eventually lead to big change.