Quarterly Newsletter 3-2014

this year’s kanthari course is well on its way and many things have happened during the past three months. In this newsletter we want to share the latest developments.

First Act

The kanthari curriculum, a journey in five acts, takes participants through a series of activities that enables them to start own social ventures/initiatives. The first four acts provide many opportunities of experiential learning what it means to set up, run and/or advise an already existing, social initiative. After the fourth act participants will start the fifth act – the moment of truth – the start of their own project.

The first act, called “The Tansalesean Adventure” starts in a virtual world which resembles a country similar to those where participants come from. It is a place that offers all sorts of challenges that may be faced by an NGO, a social enterprise or any other non-for-profit initiative. During two and a half months, participants have a chance to test-run the start of their social initiatives. During this time they face a number of bureaucratic and other unexpected hurdles. After having mastered all these, the participants won’t be beginners anymore and they will be ready to start or continue their personal projects/initiatives in their region of choice

Spread the Spice

Some of our participants consider themselves to be social entrepreneurs. Together with those, Nicola, our marketing catalyst started a unique initiative; A kanthari shop with a lovely little café attached. The shop offers little souvenirs from kanthari pens, mugs, notebooks to t-shirts and the café introduces spicy kanthari drinks, coffee and tea. The shop functions a tool to study business, planning, product design, marketing and everything about profit and loss. Visiting Students from all over India roam through the shop and fill their bags with self-made spicy Tapioca chips, kanthari tea mixtures and our home made Masala.

kanthari TALKS

kanthari Talks
The first act ended with a big bang. Our participants were given a task to make students from public schools who normally don’t have a lot of practice in speaking English, to presentable, entertaining and meaningful public speakers. It was a great experience for the students aged 8 to 14 to overcome stage fear. The event drew an audience of more than 200 People. Our participants gained a lot of practical experience by organizing the speaker’s festival, by creating an effective Curriculum for disadvantaged children and by involving local media.

Change for a Change

Our participants are selected because they come with creative and often unique ideas to create a significant change in their community, a change that might have a role model effect on other regions, societies or even countries as a whole. We are not focusing on scale but on quality, not on 1000 conventional social project ideas but on the few that create relevant mind-set changes. Changing people’s mind-sets needs fire, spice and the guts to challenge the status quo. But this requires divergent, innovative and out-of-the-box-thinking.

During Act 2 participants gained experiences in convincing people to overcome their barriers of change. For this we left the virtual world of Tansalesea and entered into Kerala, a state that is blessed with natural beauty, lots of water, fertile ground and a high level of education. Nevertheless the so called “God’s own country” faces several challenges. Every year we detect one area-that longs for change. This year it was environment. All education and all obvious beauty don’t stop people from littering, burning plastic or releasing their trash in rivers and lakes.
Our participants were empowered to work on an effective campaign to change people’s mindsets. The main target group was children. A trash art contest and an exhibition were organized where children could show their most beautiful trash installations; Jewelry made out of old pens, baskets made of wooden ice cream sticks, flower buckets made from plastic bags and and and.
The 26th of September, World Environmental Health Day was chosen to run the campaign. The goal was to engage the people of the Kalliyoor Panchayat and the local government in starting action to clean up the neighborhood. Also a pledge was made to keep the lakes and rivers clean. The entire event was organised by kanthari participants and will positively lead to a an eco-friendly Kalliyoor Panchayat.

kanthari in the media

Orsod Malik is an active blogger for social change. He recently published an article about the work of kanthari. You can read the article via Zod-culture-article
The Hindu published an article about the kanthari talks events. Read all about it at: The Hindu
National Geographic covered a story about kanthari which can be read here
The New Indian Express wrote about A kanthari for Change Makers
And Read all about this year’s kanthari participants and their dreams for social change on the newly designed Participants Profiles webpage at:
https://www.kanthari.org/kanthari-participants/
Tomasz Kozakiewicz, a 2013 kanthari graduates started kanthariplus. He reaches out to kanthari graduates and documents their work through video clips. Also he works on the alumni network. To learn what kanthari Graduates have been up to, pls check out his latest kanthariplus newsletter here

applications kanthari course 2015

The next kanthari course will start in May 2015. Several applications have been received already but we are looking for more applications to come in. For those who have overcome adversity and because of that carry a plan for social change, apply now via our website localhost/kanthari

Dear Friends,
We wish everyone a wonderful summer and we say thank you for your ongoing support to kanthari.
We also say thank you for helping us by sharing this newsletter. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your families, friends and colleagues and by printing the flyer that can be found at: http://media.localhost/kanthari/pdf/en/kanthari-flyer.pdf and hang it in your office or at places where many people can see it.

THANK YOU for your support.

With very best regards,
The entire kanthari Team,
Paul and Sabriye

www.facebook.com/kantharis – localhost/kanthari

You can download the newsletter in a PDF format including additional pictures at:
http://www.media.localhost/kanthari/pdf/en/QN3-2014.pdf