Snippet from the article
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Barefoot College, an organisation based in Tilonia — a small village two hours’ drive west of Jaipur through the arid farmland of Rajasthan — that aims to help the estimated 41 per cent of the Indian population who live below the international poverty line. Roy’s model — educating local people through peer-to-peer learning — is transformational in that it relies on the passing on of traditional skills and knowledge rather than an emphasis on outside educators bringing new ideas and influences. Local people are trained as doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, mechanics, communicators and accountants and they use simple technology in innovative and disruptive ways: mobile phones are set to work monitoring water quality through an online dataset, solar-powered cookers are constructed to break dependence on wood or costly kerosene. Some lessons at the college are recorded and uploaded to the internet. There is no hierarchy: everyone eats sitting on the floor and no one receives a salary of more than $150 per month. Importantly, there is financial transparency. Staff bank accounts are published, as are company finances.“The model has taken into account the pace at which people think, the culture, which is respected, and the capacity — the infinite capacity — of the community to adjust to, apply and to disseminate ideas,” says Roy, 65, in a calm baritone as he sits cross-legged on a rug beneath a rotating fan in his simple office on the Barefoot campus. He wears a loose red shirt, or kurta, with white pyjama bottoms. His glasses hang from a chain around his neck. “That’s what scalability is all about. It’s a model that people understand, it’s not complicated. It respects the skills that people have rather than discarding them or replacing them.”
Roy has disrupted the model that many NGOs and well-endowed foundations promote in the developing world, namely a top-down approach led by outside, often governmental, institutions. Critics argue that this methodology doesn’t offer long-term sustainable growth and isn’t scalable. Roy is among them.
“You have a graveyard of successful failures everywhere in the world with this top-down solution that has not worked. With foreign expertise… they don’t know the culture and they don’t know what’s happening in the countries.” His voice intensifies. “There is a growing anger We have to look for alternatives. It has to be bottom-up, it has to be indigenous, it has to develop solutions from the ground up, and it has to be both community based and community managed.”
There are now 24 colleges inspired by the Barefoot model in India. Since 2004, Roy has brought women from 15 African nations as well as Bhutan, Afghanistan and Bolivia to train at the camp as solar engineers. He hopes soon to bring women from Palestine. The college says it has trained 15,000 women in skills including solar engineering, healthcare, water testing and social activism, and that as a result, around 500,000 people have been provided with basic services such as healthcare, drinking water and education. On the Barefoot campus you can meet women who, only six months earlier, were day labourers and are now practising dentistry, women who formed a collective to manufacture solar ovens, illiterate farmers now overseeing engineering projects, and girls who attend Barefoot night school because they work in the fields during the day when state schools are open. Roy estimates that, in India, the Barefoot solar-electrification programme saves two million litres of kerosene every year.
The tech used at Barefoot College is simple — nothing more than a mobile phone or PC. An ongoing project is the monitoring of water quality in the region. Barefoot workers distribute testing kits and upload the data, which can then be accessed by villagers with their mobiles. Another is the Barefoot radio station which, as well as traditional music, broadcasts health and education information. People within 30km listen on their mobiles — which are charged using the solar lanterns manufactured on campus.
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Children’s Center needs space. Possibly build on Church of the Messiah to make it nearby for parents of children to participate in nearby project based education. The center will provide child care for 0-5 year old children.
Messiah is planning to host an Eastside Festival in June to promote communication among people working on projects in Detroit.
Committees were formed for Media, Housing, and Transportation.
Media: Mark Proffitt, Charles Carson, Paul Dean, Baraka Johnson
Housing: Geoff Henny, John Hughes, Carl A. Nielbock
Transportation: Frithjof Bergmann
Rev. Barry will arrange for the Housing Committee to inspect St Christopher’s House 1117 Field Detroit, MI 48214 for use as the Children’s Center. Members of the media committee will gather video and photos to document the current state of the building and problems that may need to be overcome.
Important issue of people’s essential needs being met so that they feel comfortable participating in the project based learning. Each project needs to be tied into finding people food, shelter and transportation so that they can participate.
Rev. Barry Randolph explained how he provides the skills and and resources needed by people in the community so that they can become self-sufficient. It’s covered were how to work with local businesses to employ people with felony records, teach people about basic home economics and life skills.
Media Committee will draft a letter of introduction to be sent to projects around Detroit to tell them about the intention to create the multi-media series.
Next meeting Meet 2011 March 27 at Church of the Messiah
Posted in Minutes
Post comments about the media project here.
Mix of existing successful projects and new projects
The content must fit into any media, either magazine; audio for radio or CD; video for online, TV, or DVD
After two very long meetings we’ve decided the first project will be DIVA Spotlight, a multimedia series to draw attention to the good things happening in Detroit and teach others how to do similar things. One of our core values is “everyone teaches and everyone learns.” This is how we plan to plant a seed that grows into a thriving self-sustaining community.
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