Office Tour || Kameswaram, Tamil Nadu ||

On October 6, 2020, I joined Friend In Need India Trust as a Social media marketing Intern. In my school, I learned that negative and positive forces attract each other, but in real life, I think similar entities and persons attract each other, and that’s what happened in my case! FIN Trust attracted me so much with its Vision and Mission that I decided to work in it, and at that time I never imagined I would work so long for FIN India Trust. Currently, I am a Junior Manager at FIN Trust and I would like to strengthen and expand its activities in the upcoming years.

One of the missions of FIN is to teach and train diverse stakeholder groups including school children on issues related to water, sanitation, waste management, and hygiene behavior for community engagement towards sustainability. FIN is engaged in training programs, internships, and digital skilling courses. We are living in a digitally transformed world, in which digital skills are very important for employability and therefore our programs have a positive impact on livelihoods. Presently our digital skilling courses are being run in the FIN Rural Lab and our Ramgarh centre.

But FIN’s digital skilling courses go beyond just training students to use computers. We are aware that we are facing a lot of societal challenges – many of which are being made worse due to citizens' behavior. We have proof of this everywhere in India when we see people littering public spaces, not obeying the rules of the road, cutting queues, cheating, etc. So, we want to build responsible and civic-minded champions. For this purpose, our digital skilling students also do social work projects under our guidance - https://fb.watch/qlhX3g7eRE/

So, my idea is to train the teachers of the orphanage so that they can train the children. For this, we need computers, printers, books, internet …..many things which have to be financed! We will have to write project proposals, run crowdfunding campaigns…..etc. As we embark on this ambitious education project, it feels especially fitting to begin on Basant Panchami, a day dedicated to the divine wisdom of Goddess Saraswati. While we acknowledge the hard work ahead, we approach it with confidence, seeking her blessings for clarity, knowledge, and inspiration throughout the journey.

Abhishek Pathak
Junior Manager,
Friend In Need India