My name is Alena M., and I am a Junior in the College of
Agriculture and Life Sciences from Cleveland, OH majoring in Computational
Biology with a minor in Global and Public Health.
This past summer and winter*,
I lived and worked in Mysore, India for a grassroots NGO called Swami
Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). During my time working with SVYM, I lived
and worked at their Viveka Rural Livelihood Center, helping marginalized women
of tribal populations start businesses using the Rural Social Business Unit
(RSBU) model. During the summer, my project partner and I started by visiting
all of the RSBUs and meeting all of the women who run the units and their
stories. In order to help the women increase sales, my partner and I put their
products on e-commerce platforms like Amazon India and Flipkart, helped them
develop new products to create, and generated a following for them via their
own website store and social media accounts. When I returned to India again
this past winter break, I worked with SVYM to continue to establish the
foundation of the RSBU’s production workflows and marketing strategies by
writing two detailed business process manuals, as well as began the planning
for the launch of the one of the RSBU brands, Totally Tribal, into US markets
(check it out at https://www.totally-tribal.com/ if
you’re interested!).
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| GSL team with SVYM staff. |
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| Women receiving tailoring training a the Livelihood Center. |
When I decided to go to India for the summer last January, I
had no idea what path I was setting down. If you would have told me a year
ago that I would be going to India not once, but twice, and that I would now be
a partner of SVYM and a co-manager of the US hub for Totally Tribal, I wouldn’t
have believed you. A year ago, I still thought I was going to be an engineer! I
am still reeling about how perfectly SVYM, Kenchanahalli and all of the people
have met along this journey has seemed to so effortlessly extract passion from
within me that I didn’t know was there. I feel like the luckiest person in the
world to have discovered this passion over the past couple of months, and have
been able to align it with a public narrative that actually matters in the
grand scheme of things.
I have learned so much from my time working in India with SVYM,
one of the most pertinent things being that no matter where you are from,
humans are human. We may live and act differently but deep down we are all the
same. India will always have a special place in my heart, and I encourage all
people who have a chance to study or work abroad--do it! You will learn so much
about yourself and about life that you didn't even know was possible.
*Note that Alena took Dr. Balu's course in Fall 2019 and then applied to the SVYM Winter Break Program. She returned to Kenchenhalli to assist SVYM in refining the the Totally Tribal marketing project.
