Last week we start a special month-long campaign. What makes it different from our previous blogs and stories, is that we have turned the spotlight on the work, skills and passions of our colleagues, who work at inHive’s partner organisations.
These skilled project managers, team leaders and analysts from Pakistan, Rwanda and the UK are the hidden stars in our work. They are the doers, movers and shakers. They do it all: from the daily emails with alumni network leaders, to designing and delivering trainings, conducting surveys, and articulating the strategic vision of alumni networks. They are indispensable part of our mission to foster social change and improve the life chances of young people and their communities.
Throughout November, we are publishing stories we co-wrote with Unaza, Elie and Pippa – young professionals with whom we have worked as part of our projects at the CARE Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation and Police Now. We hope that the stories of their past experiences, career development and future ambitions will show what it means to partner with inHive in practical terms. If inHive’s texts can serve as a frame, then our partners’ blogs are the pictures: they depict some of the key challenges and issues in their sectors and countries. Together they should offer you a way to better understand what it means to build alumni networks for social change.
The higher calling: community work and supporting young women’s education
By Ján Michalko and Unaza Usman, Alumni Assistant Manager at CARE Foundation, Pakistan
Unaza joined the CARE alumni team at a time, when we were neck-deep in finding new ways to help alumni committees at our 20 pilot schools to grow the number of alumni participating in their meetings. We were halfway through our first year and Unaza dove right into the deep end. She started accompanying her colleagues on their school visits to get to know the committees we are working with and the challenges they were facing.
Over the following few months, she tells me that she learnt to see the bigger picture of the community in which the schools are embedded and used the various tools that inHive suggested to the CARE team to use, in order to help committees stay organized and on track.
By the time Abi and I met Unaza in Lahore a few months later, you could not tell that confidence to work with teachers might have ever been a challenge for Unaza. As a result, we were able to continue to collaborate on designing additional strategies to strengthen the pilot networks, including ways to sustain the buy-in of senior managers and principals at the schools.
Role model for young women
One of the key benefits that Unaza highlights is in career counselling that alumni networks can facilitate. Unaza’s own life experiences explain her commitment to bringing role models and career advisors into schools. She pushed the boundaries of what young women should do for a profession, when she decided to study materials and metallurgical engineering at university.
Pursuing a STEM degree in Pakistan – as in most of the countries around the world – requires women to have a lot of courage and take risks. As she tells me, even if women finish their degrees, they are often expected to stay inside the labs when they start working.
After teaching chemistry and sciences for a few years, her next steps took Unaza to Northern Pakistan. Here she worked in remote communities, where kids’ access to education was challenging, to put it mildly. In her role, she had to find ways to make education interesting and relevant for these children living in harsh conditions. The pictures of stunning mountainous scenery that Unaza shows Abi and I from her time in northern Pakistan, as we spent time together driving to visit various schools, were breath-taking. The snow-capped mountainous region however also meant that Unaza had to carry buckets of water for her daily needs. For Unaza, however, it was a great experience. She was challenged and pushed to learn. For her, unlike many others, her career is not about having what she calls a handsome salary. The reason why she is happy in her role on the alumni programme at CARE Foundation is that she continues to learn and develops new skills. Thinking about her future, she tells me that the skills she developed through building the alumni networks and communities with inHive should be very helpful, because she is intrigued by psychology, social work and community engagement. She wants to learn how to engage more effectively with parents to shift mindsets around girls’ education.
Unaza writes:
Once you step out of your comfort zone for a greater cause and learning, there is no looking back. With faith and a higher calling, I gained the confidence to take these big steps outside my comfort zone and chose social welfare work as my career path. As I was about to graduate from my degree in engineering, I was volunteering for an orphanage development project, which gave me the first push to choose this path.
Here I realised that I want opportunities that merged my passion for travelling with my inner calling to serve the community. I always loved to travel. It is for me a mode of meditation. Settling down and surrounding myself with the materialistic world rather than a higher purpose brings me uneasiness.
My journey of inner discovery
A few years later came such a work opportunity, where I had to travel to North Pakistan for a school development programme, with a vision to Innovate, Educate, and Inspire Pakistan. At that time, I was mostly excited and enthusiastic to be around mountains, and to enjoy scenic views. Little did I know that other than harsh weather conditions, unavailability of electricity and water most of the time, the students were far away from speaking English.
I was reminded of a quote from one of the travelogues, Three Cups of Tea that I read during my teenage years, and which stuck with me, “To care about circle of children sitting in the cold on the other side of the world, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks, this might be even harder than climbing second highest mountain on earth.”
As I was about to head back after the completion of the project, one of the students said to me, “Miss, when you came here you were like a snowflake, now when you are leaving you are as tough as one of our mountains”. That day I realised, my inner self was never hungry for the scenic views, or the beautiful journey in mountains. I was eager for some higher learning purpose that could challenge my inner potential and turn my vision and purpose of life beyond my own tiny circle of life.
Giving young women platforms in alumni meetings
I continued to travel in my next job. At CARE Foundation I was given the duties to hold alumni meetings, so I started to travel to schools far away from the city life, in undeveloped nearby smaller cities. I came across many girls showing up for alumni meetings, who expressed that it was a privilege for them that their school management reached out to them through the alumni network and called them back to their schools. It was important to them because sometimes in their communities they need a valid reason to visit their old schools.
The alumni network gave them a platform to see their old classmates, discuss the problems they faced while they were students and highlighted the major challenges they encounter as girls and young women in their communities.
One of the girls shared with me the story of her first time visiting her school for the alumni meeting. She talked about her struggle. They were seven siblings and when she reached high school, her parents thought it would best for her younger siblings if she discontinued her studies and earned with them. The alumni community gave her the courage to push past her fears and 3 years later into working in other people’s houses as a help, she finally mustered up the courage to talk with her parents along with alumni core committee to let her continue the education. Finally she enrolled back in the school.
We need to counsel communities
I believe that the better outcomes you get through your struggles, the higher should be the next challenge you put before yourself. I know there are many other girls, who had to discontinue their studies for early marriages, financial instability or because of societal pressure. I know a lot of counselling is required for the parents to look for resources, rather than cutting off the education of their daughters.
What I like about my work with CARE’s alumni project and what inspires me to travel to far off places is that you can see the outcome of all your hard work in the form of sparks of hope in the eyes of girls. There are very few jobs where you can see girls coming back into their schools with uniforms and bags in their hands and not mops and vacuums to clean other people houses.
I hope and wish to continue my endeavours of travelling with community work and never let myself settle in a comfort zone because I believe I was privileged to have supportive family to pursue my dreams and get equal rights for the education. Now I owe it to all other girls who are not privileged enough to step outside their doorsteps due to societal norms. Fortunately, the alumni network has been a great blessing for us, giving us a proper platform to overcome barriers and reach those doorsteps.
A big thank you to Unaza for the contribution this week. Stay tuned for next week’s installment of the Spotlight Series!