Education is the premise of progress.
Founded in 2019, the Voyage Educare Foundation is a nonprofit that positively transforms a society by enabling education and health programs for children in low-income communities and training programs for teachers. The impact can be carried forward from instances, experiences, and people we meet at different time spaces.
To do one’s part, to create the impact one can, there’s a need to have the courage and conviction to step out of the life of convenience one built out of hard work and dedication. This venture’s voyage came into action from one such instance. Through significant experiences, such as at Teach for India as a fellow and then as a Vice Principal, interacting with the faculty, staff, management, and the parent community, carves an understanding of the education system, as it did for the Founder. From there, they began working primarily in the field of school transformation, to make an exponential impact by harnessing the potential and understanding of ecosystems.
Voyage Educare Foundation works in the area of school leadership training mentoring and capacity building, which involves managing three key stakeholders, principals, deputy principals, and all decision-makers within the school ecosystem. They primarily work with schools operating in remote areas and rural settings. The foundation bets on the idea of collective impact on the premise that all collaboration leads to improvement. Hence, they also work with teachers and third parents, for better student experience and student outcomes. Change and development in life are normal and they can happen over and over again in both our personal and professional lives. The founder went through a similar trajectory, initially working in the field of architecture, where they worked on small activities, such as campaigning for the environment and cleaning spaces to do their bit, to create social impact.
Further, they went up to take up Social Architecture, researching education in the village setup. Soon after this, unable to make contributions to the social space, they started working with Teach for India, leaving their previous occupation. After working with Teach for India for two years as a fellow, which not only gave a hands-on experience on the transition from the classroom to the school level, and the autonomy that they had. Along with one of their schoolmates, while still demarcating the boundaries of the potential of what can be done, they came across an acquaintance finding it difficult to manage a remote school. This is where the inception of the voyage took place when they ran a pilot with this school. Just like everyone across the globe, Voyage struggled due to a lack of support while scampering for resources in the first year of the Pandemic. During this time, they came across many grants and incubators, and during that search, they stumbled upon NSRCEL and were also selected by two different incubations.
This led to the onset of workshops regarding foundations of organizations, building your program, and broadening their idea of pre-incubation. NSRCEL gives one the opportunity to dive into specific niches-whether it’s for-profit businesses or social activism, specific industries or special entrepreneurship programs for women and entrepreneurs, or student-staff. Voyage Edu-Care through the help of mentors and the feedback, in the first 100 days of pre-incubation molded their understanding of the foundational structure of social organizations and how one goes about building a program using various sessions and workshops. The entire process led to the broadening of their ideas and vision, while at the same time, refining what they were doing already.
The association with NSRCEL gave an impetus to the organization, focusing on long-term impact, and the aspects of the organization or the program that they could scale. The organization entered various incubation phases, introspected upon its strategy, plan of action, and vision, and focused more on doing work that will exponentially impact the lives of children. In the next three years, they plan to build on the current five-year program. Where they’re planning to expand from 18 to 50 schools which will provide a solid ground for proof of concept. Building resources, working on monitoring and evaluation, and their growth model and scale model, where they will intensely focus on working hands-on with the schools in the communities, growing from 50-100 and then 500 schools, creating a slow but deep impact.