Sarjapur, Bengaluru
The Community Catch Up #003 called for an exciting conversation around moving ahead with the previous discussions over lunch on a bright Saturday afternoon.
Starting off with an exciting ice-breaker where the participants introduced themselves, the meet up brought together the volunteers to discuss the execution of the challenges discussed in the past.
The challenges discussed during Community Catch Up #002 were :
Early Childhood Book Challenge
Accelerating Immunisation Coverage for Rapid Urbanisation Challenge
Empowering Caregivers in Immunisation Innovation Challenge
Out of the three, the 'Early Childhood Book Challenge' saw most traction among the audience and was discussed at length. However, as we moved forward, we saw more volunteers interested in the 'Sex Education for Adolescents' projects as compared to 'Early Childhood Book Challenge'. Owing to the limited number of volunteers & their interest, we parked 'Early Childhood Book Challenge' and moved ahead with the execution of 'Sex Education for Adolescents' or 'How might we radically improve access to, and quality of, sexual and reproductive health education and services for young people?'
The community seems to be very interested with the 'Sex Education for Adolescents' topic and has always participated proactively toward the challenge.
This particular catch up revolved around two sets of arguments where the members had two different sets of views pertaining to the content delivery of the modules developed :
1. Should the modules be delivered involving the students alone? OR
2. Should we involve parents as participants while the modules are being delivered to the students ?
Further, the rest of the the discussions revolved around the PROs and CONs of moving forward with the two mentioned delivery methods.
Another topic discussed at length during the meet up was Impact Assessment and Monitoring and Evaluation mechanisms to ensure the outcome of the project. Since most of the action items are targeted towards achieving certain forms of behavioral change among the participating students and involves working around intangible attributes, it's going to be a challenge to chart out a mechanism to figure out the progress of the project. Also, Impact Assessment and M&E mechanisms need to be discussed and decided upon before we move ahead with the execution in order to ensure that we have empowered ourselves to measure progress as we move ahead with the challenge. The upcoming meet-ups might involve discussing this at length i.e. inviting experts who have had experience in working on development project where they have been responsible to measure the progress of progress with intangible parameters.
The meet up closed with the core team to work upon and explore the way forward. Should the chapter go ahead with both the delivery methods in parallel or should the chapter go ahead with the two methods subsequently ? There are multiple discussions in progress with the stakeholders involved which would assist us to arrive at a decision on how to move forward. Join us in the upcoming events to contribute to the challenge.
Lots of learning, experiences & fun to follow up.
Stay Tuned !
Cheers !
Shwetabh S Verma
Chapter Leader & Community Designer,
OpenIDEO Bengaluru Chapter
