United Nations High Level Meeting on Youth

 July 2011, New York

Recently, The YP Foundation conducted 12 consultations for the National AIDS Control Organization in India, in partnership with Plan India, consulting young people for recommendations to best address HIV prevention education. We did this with 280 young girls and boys from 5 states and in one community center, I got asked a question by 21 year old young man in a group discussion that really struck me. “Is sex an illness? Do we get sick from it? What’s the difference between HIV and sex?” Recently, a 19 year old boy who is a peer educator with us asked another question, he said -

‘How do you identify the difference between consent and violence if you don’t know what sexuality is? If I don’t know how to recognize what is acceptable and normal within me, if I can’t accept and celebrate the differences in myself, how do I know how to reach out for help, when I do need it and whom to go to?’

In India, 78% of young people under the age of 20 do not know how to have safe sex. What is of key concern is the lack of safe spaces for young people at the community level to address concerns and access evidence based, non-discriminatory, comprehensive information, that encourages boys to question their privilege, their assigned gender roles and masculinity and act in ways that are responsive to respecting women and girls’ human rights, particularly in the realm of sexuality in order to achieve gender equality.

What did we do?

Founded 9 years ago, Project 19, also known now as ‘Know Your Body, Know Your Rights‘ (KYBKYR), is a youth led and -run peer education, capacity building and advocacy programme at The YP Foundation that works with young people in communities and with policy makers to address gender equality, violence against women, sexual rights and reproductive health. Through training young people in communities on the principles of human rights and gender equality, we have reached over 1500 – 3000 young people each year, focusing on building skills in understanding and negotiating relationships, questioning power, acting with consent, the negotiation of safe sex and respecting sexual and reproductive choice.

What has the response been?

Although male participants were initially most interested in factual/biological information (e.g., the human body, sex, HIV), over time we found that sessions on gender-related attitudes, sexual violence, and power dynamics between men and women eliticited the most interest. Most male participants could relate these conversations and participated with examples from their own lives, which is a key component to ensuring that peer education and information dissemination actually result in behaviour change.  When asked about the impact of participation at a later stage in the programme, majority of young men noted that the sessions had changed their understanding of love and sexuality and taught them to question notions of masculinity.

Integrating boys and girls into skillfully facilitated safe spaces has proven critical to examining gender and power relations between them. This does, more often than not, lead to a full understanding of gender equality and helps boys internalize principles to examine their own behaviors, challenge those of others that are sexist, towards being respectful in relationships.

The process has to be personal, for it to resonate with young men and boys. So the challenge is not just how they engage in gender justice and gender equality but also whether they have the tools to take this conversation home to challenge their own elders or caregivers. Often, in more traditional, conservative and/or religious societies, there is a backlash to this that needs to be taken into consideration.

Additionally, there is a lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services that respect diversity, provide confidentiality and a quality of care – mostly because these don’t exist at ground level and youth friendly health services (YFSE) don’t integrate comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) into their services. This is important, because what young men and boys need is evidence based, scientific information that is available freely in out-of-school, community settings. This challenges an environment that young men are brought up in, where more often than not, there are community attitudes that teach men and boys that it is wrong to admit they have fears or questions regarding their bodies.

What is success?

• Integrating spaces for young men and young women– It is critical to still keep a safe and an equal space for both sexes to clarify concepts – but to have young women challenging young men – is also changing the power dynamic and how it works. It would be prudent to integrate into these spaces that there are many young people’s whose sexual orientation and gender identities do not fit neatly outlined gender boxes, and that addressing the needs of LGBTQ young people, in the context of power, violence and access to information is a critical part of this dialogue. Young people do not live isolated lives and it is critical to have individual and collective spaces that build safety as a binding factor at community levels.

The key feedback we get in communities is how many men and boys are struggling with the expectations and aspirations of being what is called ‘a real man’, a stereotypical, largely mythical cultural figure that expresses limited emotions, is handsome, strong, muscular, and virile. We noticed an increase in the number of growth hormones and supplement drugs that young men experiment with and access, the pressure to be in sexually active relationships with women that is considered to be a cultural sign of virility and the lack of understanding of sexual rights, particularly women’s sexual rights. With an approximate 150 boys we’ve engaged as peer educators, we’ve noticed a diametric change at the end of a 1-year participation programme.

The key feedback we receive is that they are able to challenge the ‘shame and embarrassment’ that is perceived and experienced and that they are able to freely ‘talk about issues of sexuality and bodily integrity and rights’, particularly with male peers. Boys also discover that the insecurity they experience is something that is a common and real experience and that they are not alone. The kinds of attitudes that change are reflected in the feedback that we receive in the programme from young boys below:

• Training adults – teachers, religious leaders, parents and community members on the importance of challenging male privilege – The rhetoric currently globally, on how critical it is to engage young people in a meaningful way often doesn’t look at how critical it also is not to isolate young people from their communities. We need to give young people the tools and language to negotiate these relationships so that they can challenge and change traditional gender roles in their societies. It doesn’t help when we empower young people with information but cannot help them work through situations of conflict or stress with family and care givers, in our trainings with them. Aahung, a Karachi-based non-governmental organization that has been working to improve the sexual health of men, women, and adolescents since 1995, does this, advocating with individuals within policy and educational systems, so as to look at a systemic change that also creates gender equal and equitable policy in the first place.

• Using diverse mediums of expression and being innovative – Theatre, dance and music are three of the most successful ways in which we have communicated with young people and they have worked with each other. Apart from the obvious, that art (both visual and performing) makes it easier to work with a diverse group of young people who may not have similar linguistic skills or cultural experiences. We now have boys leading local campaigns that advocate for women’s rights and they work as peer educators in their own communities. It is easier, we’ve found, to reach out to boys in communities than it is to single them out in school or formal settings. The YP Foundation’s programmes have flourished, using these strategies.

• Increasing awareness on HIV and STI prevention, addressing homophobia and the context and impact of both gender based violence and violence against women – there is a level of critical analysis that needs to be built into dialogues with young boys and men so that they can examine the impact of violence in their own lives and in the lives of women and girls around them. The need to eliminate violence against women needs to be internalized and boys need to make a conscious decision not to inherit and adopt patriarchal attitudes.

• Promote youth led work in this area and encourage youth-adult partnerships – Sharing good practises and strong programmes has always strengthened a movement and in that spirit, excellent programmes like ones run by the Center for Health and Social Justice and Men’s Action for Stopping Violence against Women (MASVAW) in India were initiated in 2002. A statewide movement in Uttar Pradesh, this campaign with men and boys promote gender equality, and advocates for equal rights and a violence free world for women. Similarly, Sonke Gender Justice Network in South Africa has popularized the adage – that one man can. Stop violence, reduce HIV and empower women.

In the same spirit, simply focusing on men and boys and spending majority of our programmatic funding there, on the hope that men and boys take lead or charge in their communities and that their attitudes will trickle down to women and girls who live with them – creates a lopsided strategy. One where the male gender is educated and empowered, in a position where they usually experience a higher level of privilege than women. Women and girls need to have equity in their lives and communities – be on equal footing, so to speak – to challenge the very same hierarchies that hold them down.

Where is the money in gender equality for women and girls? What percentage of your programme – should you have or support one – supports women and girls versus men and boys as beneficiaries? Where are young women and girls in our communities – are they speaking up, are they empowered to participate? It is undoubtedly difficult, but necessary to reflect and work on these questions.

Lastly, programmatically, engaging adolescent boys and young men successfully needs to capitalize on the age group it’s working with – starting from as young as 6 years old – address gender equality through sexuality education using a life cycle approach. It takes years to challenge and change behaviour and it begins with when we are young and still learning what gender neutral and rights based behaviour is.  Girls’ Power Initiative in Nigeria has been leading some of this change since 1993.

A comprehensive package that can address gender equality provides five critical elements that address:

• Psycho-social and emotional aspects
• Sexuality
• Promotion of equity
• Overcoming stigma and discrimination and promoting human rights
• How to protect and promote one’s health

Achieving gender equality asks for investing in and engaging men and boys, yes. However, this cannot and should not replace investments in girls and women’s empowerment. CSE provides the effective opportunity of working with both young men and women jointly.

   To end with a voice that isn’t mine, but is of a young man back home who I’m proud of -

“I could have never spoken to girls about issues like wet dreams before I never thought that a girl would be able to help me answer these questions. I guess our bodies are normal things; we just aren’t brought up to feel that way. No one questions why my father is considered to be the head of the household and why even in subtle ways my sister and I are treated differently. We get used to the power that comes from violence; we internalize and accept it. I think in my generation we need to work with girls like my sister and change that.” 

Ishita Chaudhry, is the founder and CEO of The YP Foundation and an Ashoka Fellow. She shared these views at the High Level Meeting on Youth recently in July 2011 in New York at the UN Headquarters, speaking on a panel co-organized by UNICEF and UNFPA.

Header: Photographer: Rachit S Barak

19 July 2011

Overview: The YP Foundation’s work with empowering young people through the ‘Know Your Body, Know Your Rights’ programme, that especially focuses on women and girls in addressing violence against women and HIV prevention through sexuality education has recently been profiled and published in the new UNAIDS and Athena Network Publication entitled, ‘Community Innovation’. You can download the publication from the link here.

On the periphery of the IAS 2011 conference taking place in Rome from 17-20 July 2011, UNAIDS in collaboration with the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS (GCWA), ATHENA, Salamander Trust, WECARe+ and Network Persone Seropositive convened a town hall dialogue to discuss how the HIV response facilitates the achievement of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all women, including women living with HIV, at every stage of their lives.

For women living with HIV stigma and discrimination and gender-based violence acutely affect their access to comprehensive services and human rights. Within health services, they often face a lack of choice with regard to family planning; disapproval from service providers with regard to meeting sexuality and fertility desires; and violation of their sexual and reproductive rights in the form of coerced or forced abortion or sterilization. Participants agreed that advancing the health and rights of women in all their diversity is fundamental to the success of the HIV response, just as the HIV response is a critical avenue for achieving sexual and reproductive health and rights for women.

The event was also used as a platform to launch a report Community Innovation: Achieving sexual and reproductive health and rights for women and girls through the HIV response. Compiled by UNAIDS and the ATHENA Network, it presents case studies pioneering community undertakings to advance women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights through the HIV response and vice-versa, from different community perspectives. This report recognizes that women face unique challenges to access and fulfil their sexual and reproductive health and rights, including gender-based violence, and therefore have less access to HIV prevention, care and support services.

“Women and girls at every level and throughout different stages of their lives must be supported to demand quality services that meet their needs and those of their community,” said UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director, Programme, Dr Paul De Lay.

Learning from these community case studies is an opportunity to enhance the AIDS response, in light of the Millennium Development Goals and the 2011 Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS. The case studies indicate that for responses to be effective they must include the empowerment and inclusion of women in all their diversity, dedicate attention to sexual and reproductive health, including improvements in maternal and child health, and address the socio-cultural practices underlying gender inequality.

UNAIDS Getting to zero: strategy 2011-2015 also places gender equality and human rights as one of three core pillars. This report is part of that commitment to ensuring that women and girls’ rights are met through the HIV response and it was undertaken in the context of the UNAIDS Agenda for accelerated country action for women, girls, gender equality and HIV.

“UNAIDS continues to be a strong advocate for women’s health and rights, as well as to strongly stand against stigma and discrimination amongst all marginalized groups. We will continue to do so until we have achieved the vision of zero discrimination,” said Dr De Lay.

- Nitika Khaitan and Aastha Mathur

Photos by Nikhil Singhal

Three times a week, from November to February, a group of 10 college students would take time out of their busy schedules. They would land up at the Ummeed Aman Gharana (Run by our partner organisation, Centre for Equity studies) near Qutub Minar; armed with digital cameras, 2-page lesson plans and emotions that ranged from excitement to apprehension. Then, they would get down to business.

An outsider observing the barren field in the Home, from 5 PM every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday would have seen a remarkable change. One by one, 25 children would start abandoning their elaborate games and tyre swings, disappearing into a classroom lit by a few electric tube lights. There, he/she would have observed the same college students, playing, working and interacting with the children at times with patience and love and at times in utter bewilderment.

All of this was part of one big (clinically insane) idea – take a group of children, who’d never held a camera in their hands before and in 3 months, turn them into movie directors.

Not quite like Professor Higgins quest to turn Audrey Hepburn, a flower girl from the dirt and grime of London’s streets into a refined lady of the royal household; our motives, of course, were different- we believe  in Article 19 written by our nation’s forefathers –“All Indian citizens have the right to freedom of speech and expression.” But we also questioned, ‘What significance could that possibly hold for those who didn’t have the means to speech and expression?’ And that’s when we applied to participate in the ‘Adobe Youth Voices’ program, run in partnership with The Global Fund for Children, which provided us with all the technical help we needed to work with the children through a medium of communication as powerful as film.

That belief and the need to answer that question is what kept us alive through day-long training sessions where we struggled with developing editing skills, the horrendous traffic jams we valiantly endured to reach our destination and of course, all the red tape that The YP Foundation convinced us was absolutely essential (it was only at the end that we realized they were right).

Even more monumental was the challenge of (as our 3 Year Strategic Plan so eloquently puts it) ‘bridging the gap.’ Our whole idea depended on the assumption that children with life stories we’d only witnessed in versions of films like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ would open up to us and actually learn what we wanted to teach them. To our utter bewilderment, they did actually want to learn with just a tiny difference: when we said ‘digital stories’, they heard ‘Bollywood films.’

Session by session, they finally understood the difference and made their peace with the idea that they wouldn’t be filming song-and-dance routines but instead, would be telling a different story, one of ‘meri kahaani, meri zubaani.’ We use the phrase ‘made their peace’ because they didn’t actually think their life stories were interesting enough to be told. Mind you, they are, in fact, extraordinarily interesting.

With more sessions (on scripting and storyboarding), they also (finally!) opened up to us – giving us an insight into their likes, dislikes, hobbies, the importance of education and their aspirations – which invariably involved earning lots of money and then giving back a lot of the same money to people growing up just like them; a selfless aim missing in many of us growing up today.

Missing in so many of us today is the belief in ‘living for the moment.’ Pure unadulterated happiness, a sense of profound wonder and awe at holding a camera in their hands, a broad excited grin at the mere sight of crayons and a blank sheet of paper. They would observe silently, play noisily, listen patiently, enquire impatiently, participate enthusiastically in activities and reluctantly listen to lectures, critically examining what we said yet also unquestioningly accepting our big idea as worth their while.

The end result of this process? Well, as some wise guy said, ‘Knowledge is Power’. If in the future, they want to share their stories, they’ll know how to do it. If in the future, they want to work with a camera, they’ll know how to handle it. If in the future, they want to work in a group, they’ll know how to accommodate other’s opinions while forming their own. If in the future, they want to just reach out and express their thoughts, they’ll know how to use an incredibly powerful medium to do it.

As for us, the core group of volunteers working on this- our initial emotions of apprehension turned to amazement at the children’s incredible capacity to retain what we taught them, then to excitement at the thought of playing and learning with the kids and finally, pride – at our kids, who now understand not only lighting, camera angles and the manual mode on a DSLR, but are confident, vocal and unafraid to express their ideas and ambitions.

And that, for those of you who patiently read this up till this point, was our big clinically insane idea.

To read more about our Digital Media Partnership with the Global Fund for Children, click here. The project, run in partnership with the Center for Equity Studies will continue in 2011 – 2012, scaling to work with an additional 25 children and 15 peer educators, ensuring that 25 children who graduated from our 2010 class continue to work with digital equipment in an enhanced media programme. Watch this space, as we release the final films of our 2010 Class of Superstars!

We are currently in the process of hiring staff at The YP Foundation, for programme and management positions. We are looking for both, young people interested in full time careers with us, as well as experienced professionals and practitioners who have focused interest in overseeing, implementing and evaluating youth led work. There are also part time positions open for young people, who are students or who have alternative commitments.

We’d be extremely grateful if you could forward this to your networks and partners, as well as share this with committed, passionate people who are interested in developing youth led work. Thank you in advance for taking the time to do so, and apologies for cross posting, should that happen. We really appreciate your support.

Go to The YP Foundation Jobs Page for more details.

Warm Regards,
The YP Foundation.

– Radhika Mathur, Right to Information Branch

While we lie comfortably in our cushioned beds of our bourgeois households, there’s a continuous struggle in the larger world. By this struggle, I’m not referring to the popular and remarkable, larger struggles of society of ‘fast unto death’ to get a Parliament bill passed in a democracy or a ‘Pride Parade’ against the discrimination faced in the country on the basis of one’s sexual identity. It is a much smaller and an everyday struggle within the realm of another household to secure the most fundamental prerequisites for what can be called an ordinary life.

It is a universal assumption that democracy is the best form of governance. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during the Second World War era, shared his opinion on democracy to the world – “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” As the latter school of thought believes, with our options otherwise running out, democracy is the last form of governance in the contemporary world.

In India, we are privileged to have the right to choose our representative in Parliament.But is that all democracy means, the availability of this right? Most of us don’t end up exercising all the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution in our lifetime. For instance, when awareness on the Right to Information Act, (2005) was mapped in the country in the year 2008 by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), the result supported my statement – only 2% young urban people were aware of the act.

However, on the other end of the tunnel, there are people in our urban locality who feel the need to exercise their rights but go through open harassment for desiring the same. Democracy at this level begins to sound synonymous to hypocrisy.

The Right to Information Branch of The YP Foundation aims to increase young people’s sensitivity towards the issue of information and awareness of laws and policies in India, provide them with the resources to review and work on ensuring the implementation of laws and policies, thereby increasing their participation in processes of governance, ensuring a transparent and accountable government.

During 2010-2011, we attempted to give the central Right to Information Act, 2005 relevance by means of applying the act to laws and policies associated with the areas of gender, sexuality, arts, education and health. One of the focus areas was enabling our children and the families we work with at the Nizamuddin Basti, through our street children project, ‘Blending Spectrum’, access Free and Compulsory Education, in accordance with the 2009 act. Our main agenda was to get our children enrolled into schools, and while working toward this we faced numerous challenges for supporting the “economically weaker sections” of society, to use the official terminology-Using the expression “Economically weak” to give these families an identity is enough to gauge societal perceptions toward the same.

For a child to be able to access Free and Compulsory Education there are a list of documents that need to be submitted to schools, ranging from Birth Certificates, Family Income Proof, Family Ration Cards( including the child’s name). We decided to assist our community with registration of ration cards- to serve the dual purpose of identity proof as well as income proof. We took the families to the concerned Ration Card office, where the officials were impolite and rude in their responses to the families. The community has never received any information on schemes they are eligible to apply for, and when there is a level of questioning, it is met with impatience and frustration.

Ration card registrations are running in the country for every economic bracket, except Jhuggis (slums). While admission dates in schools are drawing to a close the community we work with has to wait for the government to announce their new policy for the Jhuggis (slums) and the time period within which these have to be registered. An officer at the Ration Card Office blankly stated to a community member “there’s definitely a change in the system if you are allowed to step inside the big schools now, it’s a privilege for you.” Did the officer have any right to conclude, for these families, what their privilege is?

Most ration cards in the community we work with, got cancelled without any prior notice or any stated reason only to find out the new policy requires bi-metric (thumb impression) printing. If these families were given prior notice by the government, the cancellation of ration cards could have been avoided. But at the moment, till the new policy is announced, their cards are invalid, leaving the BPL card holders in the lurch, yet again.

The social stereotyping and prejudices against EWS families don’t just victimize the adults, but shockingly enough, also the children. Under Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, private schools are instructed to reserve 25% seats for EWS families, but these schools only need excuses to deny admission to these families. Even when we managed to help a family get their child enrolled into a private school for regular morning classes, the mother is being called to school almost every day with warnings of suspension of the child from the school. Is it wrong for a child, unknowing at the age of six towards societal and economic differences, to desire to feel included and to play with his classmates?

The mother is threatened, and is being made to feel obliged toward the school for enrolling her child, from a EWS family. Must we feel indebted for the fulfillment of our own due rights? An official from the school administration office opened up to her “If we have people ready to pay heavy donations to let their child sit in the class, why should they favor somebody who’s enjoying free admission and education?”

Is the Right to Equality in India really achieved in its absolute sense?

There is a dire need to step out of our convenient middle class lives, to realize the tribulations one has to face on the other side of the world. Indian democracy is not that a rewarding place to be in. Perceive the world through their eyes to see how inconvenient living in urban spaces is. The natural tendency of the middle class thinking is to be indifferent about governance issues, until it directly affects them. Think again – Is there really no need to understand, disseminate awareness on and influence policies? Or should we continue living within our comfort zones pretending the world outside is invisible?

Picture Used – Artwork by Ishita Sharma

- Sumaya Saluja, Programme Coordinator

Blending Spectrum began in 2007, on the basis of 3 realizations:

1. There was, and still is, a divide that sections young people into two, i.e. ‘privileged’ and ‘underprivileged’ sections.
2. There are many organisations working on child rights but there exists to date, a lack of sharing of resources, on being able to learn from our collective successes and challenges from the field and the effective tools for implementation that exist amongst us.
3. Young people have the time and the skills to be able to work with other young people on sharing knowledge, skill and resources.

It started out as a fairly simple process. We brought together young people from schools and colleges to work with urban street and slum children across the NCR at three locations - the New Delhi Railway Station, a home for the orphaned and the abandoned run by a partner NGO, and at the Nizamuddin Basti (an urban settlement of a community of rag pickers at large), which was inhabited by 30 families.

Over the past five years, we have progressively increased our involvement with these 250+ children, from providing material resources to help with clothing and shelter, to  getting the children into school and helping them with their academics and homework, to finally implementing a Life Skills based education model. The focus is on empowering the community to realize their rights through raising awareness on health, socio cultural and civic issues; building their communication, interpersonal critical thinking skills; developing self management and coping mechanisms while assisting the children in their access to and progress in formal schooling.  The approach has involved using interactive mediums such as theatre, dance and art, through a peer to peer educational approach. Three years into the programme, the Global Fund for Children came on board to support the programme as has the NGO Dream A Dream in 2010, as our Curriculum Development Partners.

We learned from the responses given and feedback received from the children and their parents and have developed a response based on what the community identified as their needs. With time and continuous interaction, our understanding of these issues have strengthened, as have our ties with the community.

In 2010, we looked at refining our monitoring and evaluation systems for the programme, including a student-based and youth-led evaluation of the programme. The process has been challenging, both within the organization and with our stakeholders and there are still many things we are trying to grasp. Securing multi year funding? Ensuring communications support to the community? Engaging in advocacy and policy work on Child Rights? Mapping behavioral change in children? Sourcing Ration Cards for families to get access to formal schooling in private institutions?

There are challenges, like everywhere else, but they also contain solutions and lessons. This is what I have learned from my work with 180 children and 70 young people over the past two and a half years on essentially, what works:

1. If you’re working with children, make it FUN. They like the same things that you liked when you were their age.
2. Give them the rationale behind an instruction you are giving them, like you do with adults. They might just listen to what you said. Plain do’s and don’t get a nod, not behavioral change and no child like to be infantilized.
3. There are a lot of manuals and materials out there. What you need when working on Life Skills with children is to know the children first and then see what manual and approach works. No one manual has worked for us. Each year we have adapted our modules to the specific needs of the children we work with. A manual by itself is very different from a location and the context you are working in.
4. Feedback forms with children don’t work immediately or in many cases. Individual interviews using media such as video or photography with and by people children are comfortable with and art activities, however, do. The strongest modus operandi to learn and no surprises there, is learning through playing.
5. Don’t ask a child “aacha laga ya nahi? (“Did you like it or not?”). Simple questions will get you simplistic answers and they will usually always say “yes”. If you need feedback, give them time and different tools (creative mediums like music and art work well) to be able to reflect and do so individually.
6. It is important to give both child and peer educators space and time to reflect on their learnings and for the programme team to understand what this learning has been.
7. It is helpful to have someone minute/document during sessions/workshops, to ensure all feedback and questions are documented. It is understandable that you may not remember all the questions you were asked by the children you’re working with, but the children do remember, so it is important to have tools available that ensure that nothing is lost due to the understandable 40% retention of the human mind. Write it and don’t forget to follow up.
8. Always be prepared. Children like lesson plans and learn from them better when you know what you are doing.
9. Building trust takes time. They are used to be speculative and untrusting and you have to prove yourself to them. It’s ‘Guiltily until proven innocent’, so be patient and persistent.
10. Don’t assume what children are capable of. Give them a chance to surprise you. More often than not, they are smarter than we field educators ‘assume’ them to be.
11. The peer educator/volunteer’s behaviour, conduct and actions on location are more important than what they say. The children are observing you as soon as you step in.
12. Follow up on the habits you wish them to develop. For example, if you want them to wash their hands then ask them to do so before and after every activity. One doesn’t need a separate activity highlighting the importance of washing hands, children learn best by doing.
13. ‘Do, see, hear’ is the best approach for training volunteers or teaching children. For example, if the child is to draw a road, while he/she is colouring clarify the colours on a red light, zebra crossing etc, instead of beginning the workshop with a presentation from your side. Make the child an active participant, someone who can also lead the learning process.
14. Smaller the group, more effective is the learning. 1 volunteer to 5 children is the maximum ratio that has worked for us.

You may already know all of this, the main point with working with children is that there is no one strategy or method that works. It begins with meeting, talking, but above all, listening. Once you do have a relationship with the children you work with, based on good communication and a foundation of trust, you’ll know what will work and what won’t and that will remain fluid as both you and the children will continue to grow and change. Above all, if you don’t understand something, a child has said or thinks, ask them.

When I was 17 years old in 2002 I saw a video on television that I will never forget for as long as I live. It was an image of a group of children being burnt alive in a street in Gujarat, a state in Western India. These children were from Hindu and Muslim communities and they were being burned alive in the name of religious fundamentalism, in one of the worst incidents of state sponsored genocide in India’s history. We were having dinner at my home that day, 3 generations of family sitting together and this was the evening live news coverage.

And later on, when the media asked the Chief Minister of that state, what he thought was the reason for riots between two communities and why the government had done nothing but watch this massacre, I will never forget his response. ‘Every action,’ he said, ‘has an equal and opposite reaction’. It hit me hard, when I read those words that we live in a country with zero accountability. Where government officials can quote Newton’s Third Law of Motion as sufficient justification for communal riots. Where so many of us silently accept the violation of people’s human rights because somewhere, we’ve accepted the idea that we can do nothing.

I was a high school student that year, preparing to give my final year examinations. The images and statements from the riot kept coming back to haunt me. As a young woman, I realized that I was powerless and that I was not alone. Young people constitute 31% of India’s population. That’s 315 million young people in India, who think they have no ability to affect change. Would this be the legacy that we left for future generations to come? That my generation stands and watches silently as people lose their lives?

I began my work 9 years ago, because I wanted to change those silent spaces in our lives. I want to live in a world where human rights are upheld, where young people’s leadership skills are strengthened, where women and young people are recognized as powerful change makers and equal stakeholders in society, and are involved in making policies and executing programmes that impact our health, rights and lives.

In 2002, with this vision, we started a youth led organization in India known as The YP Foundation or TYPF. TYPF supports and enables young people to create programmes and influence policies at all levels in the areas of gender, sexuality, health, education, the arts & governance. In the last 9 years, we have gone from 3 high school students working from my parent’s bedroom to 300,000 young people across the country.

In 2009 we decided to challenge the status quo, setting up India’s first youth led campaign for legalizing and supporting the implementation of sexuality education. ‘Know Your Body, Know Your Rights’, a campaign supported by IWHC, UN organizations and civil society. Since then, the Know Your Body, Know Your Rights programme has trained 300 young activists from different communities and cities across India. What we are challenging is the convention that young people diverse communities cannot work with each other, because they are too different. Rich and privileged and poor and unprivileged young people come together to lobby collectively and in their own communities, for safe access to health information and services.

When I began this work, people told me at every stage in my community, that change wasn’t possible and that this wasn’t my path. Women in own family and my community told me as a girl, to be ‘careful’, as women entrepreneurs weren’t considered ‘good marriage material’. They didn’t make good wives, and that I should focus on growing up to get a husband and having children. Living and growing up in a tremendously strong patriarchal society, my parents and my brother had to defend my decision to many people, but they stood by me, their strength giving me the unusual freedom to challenge the societal boundaries of being a girl.

In 2007, I got accepted to an Advocacy in Practice training in Hyderabad, India. At the time, sexuality education had been banned in 11 states and with the tools, information and skills we learned, were able to challenge this ban, by holding our first Press Conference and getting young people’s voices into daily newspapers, beginning a much needed dialogue with decision makers and policy makers. 4 years later, we have begun much needed dialogue within committees that enable us to input on national policies that address HIV, Drug Abuse and Sexuality Education.

Earlier this year, we received a request from an 18-year-old young woman, as we often do, to find a safe and affordable health clinic that could provide her with safe abortion services she needed. She called me at 3am, her parents had asked her to leave their home, as they were ‘embarrassed’ of an unwanted pregnancy. It took us half the night to find her the services and support she needed and I will never forget how upset, scared and worried she was. Our work is not a 9 to 5 job where we just give technical information, but providing critical support systems to young people when they have no one else to turn to.

I grew up with very information on my sexuality, body or right to health, despite being a privileged young person. No one ever taught me that women have the right to experience pleasure. We are always taught about our sexuality and bodies with fear, as if it is a disease and almost never, as a right that can be celebrated. This must change. If young people are trusted, given accurate information about their bodies and are encouraged to make informed decisions, they can be empowered to protect themselves and support their peers.

Leadership for my generation embodies the challenge of bringing together people from diverse fields and schools of thought. ‘Leaders’ in our generation don’t need to be single individuals with exceptional brilliance, but rather shared roles in communities. When you invest in building the skills, knowledge and access that a young person has, you empower young people to create change in their communities, not just for each other, but also for future generations to come. The return on that investment is boundless and standing here before you, I am but one example of that.

There is a time when everyone comes across something that they need to stand up for –within yourself or in your environment. Women need to stand up for other women. Our work is not about giving people privileges, but ensuring that their human rights are realized. This is the way it should be. Until every woman and every young person can stand up for themselves and lead just and healthy lives, our work is not done and we cannot go back to the comfort of our silence.

Ishita Chaudhry is the Founder and CEO of The YP Foundation. She made this address at the 2011 Annual Gala at the International Women’s Health Coalition in New York. Ishita can be reached at theypfoundation@gmail.com

Written by Ishita Chaudhry for Music Basti, featured at musicbasti.org

Six years ago, I met a young lady over a cup of coffee. A few features of that meeting stand out in my mind. It was early evening; the lady in question was meticulous, interested, with a cool reserve and friendly interest in exploring not just what was, but the possibilities of what could be. Her notebook, stands out in my mind, for no particular reason, other than the fact that I had nothing to write in and wasn’t quite sure what my answers were going to be, to some serious questions about what The YP Foundation was and how we could work together.

But if you know Faith Gonsalves like I have, the questions are always specific. A blend of curiosity mixed with intent, pure purpose, genuine passion and the seriousness of ability in a conversation that will always challenge you to think and then think again. The stakes are always higher with some people when you work, because they raise the bar, by virtue of how they think the picture can be re-crafted to begin with. They bring a new kind of challenge to the work that you do, force you to move outside your comfort box. They help you grow, in immense outspoken, quiet ways.

Close to nine years of working with more than five hundred young people, in the staffing structure of an organization like TYPF that has worked with over five thousand young people over the past nine years, sometimes it is hard to remember each and every contribution made without needing to peer down the books of memory lane.

Yet sometimes, it isn’t hard to remember at all, for people’s presence is marked so clearly by their contributions, their inimitable footprints in the sand.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Faith grow over the past five years. From the moments of having her with us at The YP Foundation as our Administrative Coordinator, to seeing her work as a Peer Educator on a project that addressed understanding the Indian Education System to taking flight with her own editorial venture The Bridge on ‘Understanding Afghanistan’. At TYPF, Faith never lacked initiative, passion or drive. Somewhere, we also began talking about the fact that she felt that what she was doing wasn’t enough. She felt more, I think, for more and the current picture was incomplete, inconsistent, it needed exploration, challenging and possibly, so did she.

We had some strong turbulent times working together. There is an irrevocable, irreversible bond you create with someone when you build with them, it’s completely addictive, an intense, alive, reactive, explosive process and a big part of why I love the work that I do. Plentiful moments where we agreed and many where we totally disagreed, how she thought systems should come together and what I thought made people tick. What was the most fascinating to me in the disagreements was the manner in which they were dealt with. With Faith, there is no walking away, its confrontational, real, in the most critical ways possible. She gave the work a certain dignity, which it possibly never had before. The Administrative Division of the organization went from being the back-end of an elaborate event mast to being the human resources arcade of how people began to connect and build the energies of social change. This is one of her most critical contributions to The YP Foundation, it fundamentally changed the way we value how we build our work and what sustains the same.

Why am I writing paragraphs describing the girl I have seen grow tremendously? Because I think transitions are important. The changes they mark in journeys are critical. To the kind of people we are, who we become and that directly filters into what we do and create. To say that I am proud of Faith and what she does is an understatement. Like many young people who came before her at The YP Foundation and many who are yet to, she made a series of transitions, for many these are fleeting, for others more permanent. The ones who will not sit idle on what burns them, it is inspiring to watch them create.

The machine of The YP Foundation, I would hope, is oiled to push your thoughts, help you meet people, discover information, resources and above all, light a fire of discontent. Something you could do better, challenge, change and most importantly, the process of internalization, of challenging the ideas of empowerment, equity, justice and the vision of promoting, protecting and advancing young people’s human rights. The organization supports and enables young people to create their own programmes and influence policy, working in the areas of gender, sexuality, HIV/AIDS, education, health, life skills, film and literature, the arts and governance. The twin objective is to increase the leadership skill set and ability of each young person we work with by challenging and developing feminist values and ideology that encourages increasing access to informed decisions, inclusion, gender equality amongst others and understanding the full body of human rights.

How do you understand if one or five years of working with a young person have made a difference to their minds, in a way where they will be inspired enough to challenge the mould you offered them in and do something wildly, unexpectedly brilliant with it? You wait. And as with the many generations of nine years of young people who pass through this wheel of time with many commonalities, often-dual generalists, you notice with alacrity, the people for whom this step has merely been the beginning.

When Faith first spoke to me about starting Music Basti, it seemed a spectacular fit. Not just to challenge the conception of what the ‘needs’ of out of school underprivileged young people are. I’m consistently tired of boxing poverty with the implication that there is never a desire within a child to move beyond the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter and that every programme that addresses the rights of the child must only look at one of the aforementioned three. Rights of course, particularly, sexual and reproductive health and rights, are a mysterious aspect of a dimly lit future. The conception of holistic learning is limited, both in principle and in application. The lens of child, adolescence and young adulthood are not as blurred into each other as they often should be and children are infantilized, puritanical representations of childhood innocence, sans desire, sans rights, or certainly the ability to craft an independent identity for themselves. The idea of Music Basti, a programme that would give children agency, appealed to me immensely.

Further, the gauntlet thrown to a different economic and cultural agenda, a challenge made to the assumptions within the arts of the classist structures they often belong in and who are they are made accessible for. An analogy could be made to three critical habits of an evolving movement, the first, of questioning and reclaiming the status quo. The second where there is developing diverse leadership and sharing power, and three, creating self-sustaining movements that focus on substantive change.

Photo : Shiv Ahuja – The Blending Spectrum Festival: Celebrating Potential. A concert by The YP Foundation and Music Basti, featuring artists with  children we have worked with from the Uma Pandey Rainbow Home for Children, Aman Biradari. India Habitat Center, 2009.

The programme has clear elements of all three. Music Basti does not assume that children would like to learn, but rather works with them on defining a common learning goal and works to achieve that target with their stakeholders, rather than for them. The team brings together a diverse group of passionate volunteers that include the home staff of our partner Aman Biradari, working across three of their homes for children, Khushi, Ummeed and Kilkari. The level and definitive sense of skill and change comes from the children, who hold Faith and her team accountable for the highs and lows of learning and working together, in a space where the learner and learnee are equal stakeholders, positioning the arts as a medium for the very same equality and perhaps, equity.

In the ways that The YP Foundation could have supported the genesis of Music Basti, has served to bring both organizations together over the past years. Our doors and our hearts will remain open to them and we have watched them grow over the past two years with deep pride.

In a recent conversation in the Philippines, at a regional youth activists meeting, young people from India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria were describing how very necessary it was, for the youth movement to not just retain it’s identity based on the hierarchies of age and I would agree. The space to build in the youth movement is an inclusive call, for a common dialogue between diversities that claim multiple identities. We are young, that is but one part, of being part of movements that claim disability, feminist, living with HIV, LGBTIQ, sex work, having a religious identity, or maybe not, the list is endless. The highlighted underbelly was that in addition to building a vibrant and inclusive movement, there is need to do more than simply getting young people to the table, there is a need to empower them with information and negotiation skills so that they can make the most of being there.

Our work is interconnected, circular, and then, not so much. In what we do at The YP Foundation, in how Music Basti raises that bar, in how Faith started began us and how we learn from the work she does with children today. To think, of how this movement is enriched, of how the complex fabric of social change is deepened and the multiplicity of building blocks that stretch another year, another layer, another floor, pushing the aspiration level higher.

Photo : Shiv Ahuja – Peer Educators and Staff Members from Blending Spectrum at The YP Foundation, a programme that increases urban street and slum children’s access to life skills, education and health in the NCR.

Faith’s passion is faultless and her vision is absolutely beautiful. A world where children have equity, in the most powerful way and can express themselves as easily in art, as they can in life. Music Basti is a commitment to how children can use the arts to learn and be agents and masters of their own journeys of change and learning. They are living proof that nine years of hard work is not enough and is perhaps just the beginning, but that the journey is far from thankless, not as lonely as it seems and above all, not without the real ability to create honest to goodness change, working in solidarity with fairly spectacular people who make it more than worth it

Join us for a cocktail reception to meet Ishita Chaudhry and learn more about The YP Foundation’s work and sustaining youth led movements

February 10, 2011
6:30 – 8:00pm
Change.org
1825 K Street, NW, Suite 825
Washington, DC 20006

Suggested Minimum Donation: $25.00

With a core focus on supporting and enabling young people to create programs and influence policy in the areas of gender, sexuality, health, education, the arts, and governance, The YP Foundation’s mission is to promote, protect and advance young people’s human rights in India by building leadership and strengthening youth led initiatives and movements. Founded in 2002 by Ishita Chaudhry at the age of 17, The YP Foundation has worked directly with 5,000 young people over the last 8 years, training them as peer educators for more than 200 projects in India.

The YP Foundation believes in empowering young people’s access to information, services and rights such that they can build collective platforms to challenge and develop their leadership potential and impact positive social change. They empower young people by supporting their work through three key focus areas of awareness and advocacy, community partnerships and programs and communications and skills development.

Please join us to learn more from Ishita Chaudhry about how her organization has reached 300,000 children, adolescents and young people between the ages of 3-28 years and what more can be done to support the largest ever generation of young people.

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To donate to the YP Foundation, please click here. ***Be sure to indicate that your gift is in honor of “TYPF-Project 19” in the name field.

Suggested minimum donation is $25.00 to attend the event. Gifts of any size are welcomed and tax-deductible. If you can’t attend, please still consider making an online donation to this important work. Please make checks payable to IWHC and write “TYPF-19” in the memo section of check.

For more information, please contact the event hosts, Melinda Fox and Jennifer Redner at 202-669-7764.