Apply to become a Fellow on www.thegoaschool.com/fellows
Is The Goa School helping to create a more equitable society in India? Have we been able to demonstrate a clear social impact?
These are hard questions to answer.
We do believe that we are on to something, however. This is based on the wonderful feedback we have been receiving from our Fellows. With their permission, we are showcasing some of their responses, under their individual storyboards below.
Meanwhile, here is a peek at what we’ve been able to achieve so far.
Proof of concept
The Goa School’s inaugural session of a week-long contact program in Goa was launched in September 2021. Since then, we have three batches, and there is a fourth one in the making, in January 2024. The program is not without its challenges, but we’ve got a model that works.
By Dec 2023, we built a community of 60 people directly linked to The Goa School. This includes 17 Fellows, and 43 mentors, speakers and facilitators. This community is linked to each other via The Goa School Hive Mind, a resource group for life.
A growing community
Of the 17 Fellows, 11 are women and six are men, the with majority in the 21-29 years age group. The Goa School attracted applicants from Goa, but also other parts of the country such as Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. See our fellows line-up.
Also, 26 of 43 selected mentors, speakers and facilitators are women. They specialise in a variety of topics including management, economics, conservation, photography, media and more. The Goa School attracted professionals from Goa, Delhi and other places in India, as well as from Bhutan, Italy, Mauritius and The Netherlands. They have outstanding academic achievements from Cambridge, CASS Business School, Columbia, Harvard, North Carolina, Oxford and Wageningen universities, to name a few. They are also powerful people in public life, including CEOs, well-known photographers and authors. See our mentors line-up. | Watch our speakers online.
Storyboards
The first batch of Mentors and Fellows ended their yearlong mentorship in September 2022, giving us our first batch of graduates from The Goa School. This page features storyboards from some of them : Rohit Kumar | Madhu Priya | Karen Dafini | Gauri Khamkar | Simran Varma | Irshad Khan. They graduated in September 2022, and are still a part of the Goa School Hive Mind. The second batch graduated in March 2023. Here are some of their stories: Sharukh Sheikh | Stephanie Mani. The third batch graduated in November 2023. (More stories coming soon).
The Goa School encourages positive action and tries to pre-select candidates with a penchant for making change, and it does not ‘de-select’ candidates for a lack of these qualities either. We also do not ‘police’ the mentoring relationships, allowing many flowers to bloom. We believe that everyone can benefit — possibly in uncountable ways — from new knowledge and networks. We believe that learning and changing mindsets is a transactional process that takes time, and that we cannot force-feed transformation.
For further insights, watch a discussion between The Goa School’s founder-director, advisor and operations head, marking two years of operations.
Outreach
The Goa School has gathered interest from people around the world. Over the last year, since January 2023, we have received 2.2K visitors with a high level of engagement. We also have a following of over 500 on Facebook, and 498 on Linked IN (up from 345 last year).
