AIF Launches Youth Ambassador Program for High-Schoolers 

Recently, AIF’s Youth Ambassador Program’s pilot class returned from India, full of ideas and reflections into the dynamic and complex country, AIF’s Youth Ambassador Program (AYAP) is a service-learning experience in India for US high school students. The program seeks to foster an awareness of social development in India among its participants through visits with local communities, Indian peers and schools, leading NGOs, and the private sector. Students engage with an AIF service-learning curriculum and are exposed to issues of poverty and other challenges facing vulnerable communities. This year, the trip’s focus was on water.

Accompanied and guided by AIF Trustee Usha Nesamoney and Senior Supporter Purvi Kunwar through the range of experiences offered during the two-week trip, the 21 high school students were encouraged to view everything through the lens of water. On visits to rural villages where access to clean drinking water is a commodity, students witnessed the time it took to obtain and purify water. At high-end hotels, students observed how cities treat water in private facilities. On a trip to the campus of tech and consulting giant Infosys, students learned how larger corporations recycle water in their own water plants and provide it to the community, as well as what Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives are doing to improve access to and quality of water.

The trip also facilitated interactions and discussions with peer students in India, exposing the Youth Ambassadors to different educational, cultural, and social issues and encouraging them to think critically about solutions to local problems.

 On a visit to school implementing Adobe Youth Voices India (a global philanthropic partnership between AIF’s Digital Equalizer and Adobe Foundation), the US and Indian students worked together on a special project. Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) India encourages its students to use media and technology to express themselves and make sense of the social and economic issues affecting their communities. Their project was to photo-document issues related to water in their home-towns – where they get water, how they treat it, heating methods, and use. AIF’s Youth Ambassadors and AYV students then had facilitated discussions about the stories the photos told. The US students also visited the homes of their AYV peers, observing in person the struggles for water and building relationships with the communities.

"It was an amazing experience to collaborate with AYV and DE school students and hear various stakeholder perspectives to understand issues around water and sanitation and to brainstorm solutions". – Sophia N., 8th grade

AIF’s Youth Ambassadors had several other interactions and discussions with Indian students at various schools and organizations including a school implementing AIF’s Digital Equalizer, exposing them to a variety of discussion topics and communities during their stay. They also attended presentations by local experts on matters such as lake conservation, social enterprise’s role in water recycling, and more. The program also arranged for cultural experiences like visiting temples and eating traditional food. 

“It was an eye opening experience to collaborate with students that seemed to have such a different background. It was great to see that we thought similarly about water scarcity and purification.” – Ellie K., 9th grade

After all of their experiences, the students participated in a three-day workshop brainstorming innovative solutions to some of the problems they had witnessed. The Ambassadors intend to continue their exploration of these solutions back in the US and to be mentors to the next batch of Ambassadors heading to India in the summer of 2015. The Youth Ambassador Program aims to create a long-term leadership opportunities for continued collaboration with AIF, its programs, and the communities served. 

"The AIF Youth Ambassador program is a unique global program that inspires high-schoolers to learn about social issues in rural India, collaborate with their peers in Indian schools and create innovative solutions to issues faced by the most underprivileged in India. AYAP is already off to a great start and we hope to involve thousands of high-schoolers in the coming years, sparking in them a desire to give back to their local and global communities." - Diaz Nesamoney, AIF Board Member

Interested to know more : Please send an email to newengland@aif.org