Monday, February 10, 2014

Meeting our Partners


To kick off the morning we had a bit of team bonding by describing our life journeys:

We then were able to finally able to meet our partners face to face.  We met in ballroom 3 of our hotel and Shruti and Mamtha kicked off the event with introductions of IBM and Pyxera.  They explained why we do Corporate Service Corps as well as what IBMs priorities are for India and our Corporation on a whole.  We then had time for each of the partnering organizations to introduce themselves and what they wanted from this experience.  After the partners finished each of us went in front of the room and presented about ourselves and why we we're passionate about corporate service corps.  After the intro's and lunch we broke into our individual teams and got deeper into understanding our SOWs.

We sat with the 5 representatives of Swabhimaan NGO (2 were interns who grew up in Ludhiana, but were studying Engineering at a school in Mumbai) and learned the history of the education problem in India, in addition to the many challenges they face as an NGO and as an education provider today.  We are very excited to have the opportunity to have the two interns, Vishwas and Sameer, work with us on achieving the objectives for Swabhimaan as they have a lot of insight into this city, state and country as well as teaching in one of the Swabhimaan schools for the last week.


We have decided that tomorrow we will go visit one of the schools with Kumar to see first hand all of the things we heard about today.  On Wednesday morning Kazu, Eduardo and I will meet as a team at the hotel to outline our specific objectives and milestones for the next 4 weeks and hopefully have Vishwas (Sanskrit word meaning Trust) and Sameer (meaning Wind) join us in the afternoon to put the final touches on the SOW and have a proposal with clear objectives and milestones for Swabhimaan to sign off on. Later in the week we may join the Bharti team and visit one of Bhartis schools to see the different approaches and models they have vs. Swabhimaan.  

The great advantage we have with this group is that 3 of the 4 teams have similar objectives or programs and we can potentially team our groups together for even greater success.

We then went to an amazing dinner at The Yellow Chile as a whole team including Mamtha, our IBM CSR Leader for India. Jaspreet, Shruti and Mamtha have been such amazing hosts!!





2 comments:

  1. I love your Journey drawing!! Especially the little dog face! I want to do one. What a cool exercise- you have had quite a life already so far. My vote where those 2 arrows are concerned though is, obviously, back to CO!

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  2. Great job on your life journey! So glad to see your smiling face and be privileged to go on this amazing experience with you through your blog. I can't wait to see all of the great accomplishments made on your team's journey. Thank you for sharing so much of yourself in these posts!

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