Gaurav Singh is a purpose-driven social entrepreneur with eight years of work experience in education and leadership development. He is the co-founder of Slam Out Loud and has been an entrepreneur incubatee at some of India’s most reputed social incubators. He was the winner of Unleash’s accelerator program in Shenzhen, China. He is also a certified action learning coach from the Action Learning Center, UK, and has shared his journey and learning through two TEDx talks and multiple leadership-based forums.
Excerpt:
“A few weeks after submitting our proposal, the education body responded positively. However, by the time they gave us a timeline for the work, we were already stretching ourselves terribly thin. Physical distance (our office was based in Delhi at that time), poor distribution of work (amongst existing projects and deadlines), and the leanness of our team (four permanent employees and a few interns) further compounded our troubles.
During this time, we were trying to form on-ground relationships with community members in Kashmir but kept coming up short—primarily because the same people travelling back and forth from the Valley also had to set up day-to-day systems, run our ongoing programmes, and do the compliance work for government certificates. To complicate matters further, our timelines for the Kashmir intervention coincided with the scaling of the Voice for All programme (from 1,500 to 50,000 children) and the recruitment and induction period for the Jijivisha Fellowship.
Needless to say, we were stretched very thin. Our work timetables became immensely chaotic, resulting us being burnt out and unable to focus on the things that needed the most attention, both in Kashmir and in Delhi.”
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