Hasta La Ideas

pimg alt=”kiransethited.jpg” src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/kiransethited.jpg” width=”468″ height=”314″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” /br /
emKiran Bir Sethi, at the 2009 TED India Conference, photo by a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/drona/4094838356/”Vasudev Bhandarkar/a/em/p

pJust out on a href=”http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13508″Design Observer/a, William Drenttel’s got a fantastic profile of Kiran Bir Sethi, founder of the a href=”http://www.schoolriverside.com/”Riverside School/a and brainchild of the a href=”http://www.designforgivingcontest.com/designweek/default.html”Design for Giving Contest/a, an initiative sweeping across the globe this year. Here’s a quick excerpt:/p

blockquoteIn early 2009, Sethi launched her biggest initiative to date, a national campaign that encourages schoolchildren across India to participate in a one-week project to change some aspect of life in their own communities. With only a few months’ lead time, she bravely vowed to involve 20,000 schools and 100,000 students. In fact, 32,274 schools across India participated in the “Design for Giving School Contest”, and hundreds of thousands of school kids were involved. Participants entered as student teams represented through a classroom, grade, or school. Having been invited to “redesign” their communities, winners were chosen based on their projects’ impact according to the number of people affected, quickest impact, maximum potential for long-lasting change, easiest to replicate, and most environmentally friendly. A special Gandhi Prize was also awarded#151;all projects take place the week of October 2, the revered leader’s birthday./blockquote

pand/p

blockquoteThe thousands of projects submitted to the “Design for Giving School Contest” ranged across nine languages and diverse imperatives. Among them: /emSave Our Mangroves, Help Reach the Unreachables, Avoid Transgender Discrimination, Care for and Protect the Homeless, and Stop Child Marriages. Also proposed were Collect Plastic Bags Week, Playground for Children, Dignified Attire, and a Stop Spitting Campaign./em My favorite proposal came from a village where the crematorium was located next to the schoolyard. Children who had clear sightings of burials during recess organized to petition the town council to erect a wall blocking their view. The wall doubled as a space for posting public announcements. Per the contest’s stipulations, a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyBTVBc9Tn8″this project/a too was accomplished within a week./blockquote

pRead Bill’s complete post a href=”http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13508″here/a, and watch last year’s award ceremony below. I am privileged to be a jury member on this year’s competition, and will share some favorite projects in the fall. (TEDtalk a href=”http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge.html”here/a.)/p

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