Pooja Kulkarni and Pallavi Patil, founders of Pune Learns, have seen the initiative grow and mature over the last six years. Read below to learn about their perspective on the ‘Then & Now’ at Pune Learns.
Looking back all these years later, it’s hard to conjure up a clear memory of the inception of Pune Learns. What we can remember is how those first few months felt – both tough and exciting, with eager discussions in the CoEP boat club to late night brainstorms in our apartments. After those initial stages, our meetings acquired more structure, moved to more formal locations like booked classrooms, and finally, these last few years, they’ve moved to a virtual format. Our organisation has been changing constantly, and on our 6th anniversary, we wanted to look back on the ways in which we’ve grown over the years.
- Student Demographics
For many years, our target demographic had been children. For over four years, we worked primarily with children, and that phase was extremely fulfilling. The joy of teaching children and being a part of their lives is something that we will always cherish. All the fun-filled events we held in CoEP, like talent shows, art sessions, and spelling bees wouldn’t have been the same without our incredible young students.
However, we realized last year that a lot of the expertise we’ve gained over the last 6 years can also be applied to older students. Since then, we’ve expanded our age range to over 3 times what it was before, by creating the Empowered Communication Program and Mentorship Program to help adults accomplish their personal and professional goals. It’s been very interesting to see our mentors help these students make concrete strides in their careers through the tools we’ve provided them. Some of the students from our mentorship program have even contributed to our blog! Expanding our student demographics has taught us a lot about how to adapt our teaching methods, and we hope to keep expanding and adapting.
- Diversified Leadership Team
Speaking of expansion and diversification, the leadership team today looks very different from how it did 6 years ago! When we first started Pune Learns, we were all engineers studying at CoEP, dividing our time between volunteer work and college.
While a large portion of our team is still from the CoEP community, over the years we’ve diversified to include passionate individuals from various backgrounds – social impact, consulting, finance. We love the animated discussions these unique perspectives have brought in and believe that this diversity is what has helped us initiate new and improved programs.
- Volunteer – Student Relationships
One of the main things we’ve learned over the years is that keeping a huge group of children focused is challenging. Our volunteers have come up with a lot of creative ways of holding attention, but the absolute best way of doing this is by giving the students individual attention. During our first few years, we grew very rapidly, but as we grew, our communities grew larger in size too, skewing the volunteer to student ratio. Over the last couple of years, we’ve scaled down again, and taken on more volunteers for smaller community sizes, leading to a much stronger bond between the volunteers and students. Our students thrive under personal attention, and this has increased the impact we’ve been able to have.
These are just some of the main ways in which Pune Learns has advanced over the years. Some adjustments have stemmed from a deeper understanding of how to best serve our students, while others have arisen due to necessity, like our recent move to completely virtual operations. The organisation has changed a lot over the years, but one thing that hasn’t changed is our passion for what we do, and our love for all our students. We hope to keep growing every year, and become a part of the journey for more and more students in Pune.
– By Pooja Kulkarni & Pallavi Patil