Later this month, Head Held High Foundation marks ten years of work on the ground. This adds up to a decade of impact and learnings as well as several thousand examples of change and transformation. Our work actually began even before 2011, the year we were officially incorporated as a trust. We ran our first youth-centric program in Bangalore in 2007 with a batch of eight young men and women from rural parts of Karnataka. Their life trajectories following the program inspired our larger mission of poverty alleviation and inform our work even today.
We have always used every opportunity to take stock of our efforts to empower youth, families and communities in moving out of poverty. In 2019, when we conducted an impact assessment study and talked to youth who had completed our program earlier, we uncovered many powerful stories of real change with evidence of growth along many dimensions. These served as validation of the transformation thesis or the theory of change behind our youth transformation interventions.
Below is an excerpt from our 2019-20 Annual Impact Report detailing the journey of youth in our program:
Our goal in 2021, is to leverage this milestone and the exponential quality of ten to explore how we can tap into the larger ecosystem in order to significantly scale our impact (with regard to key SDGs). That is what the Power of Possibilities is all about. It’s a year-long campaign during which we aim to invite partners, social sector thought leaders, public officials and others onto our digital platform to share ideas, insights, opinions and more. The hope is that all of this will open doors for greater collaboration and new partnerships.
Here are some things we hope to share on the Power of Possibilities (PoP) platform over the next few months:
- Discussions on the transformation thesis driving our work and ways to strengthen it
- Insights from partners and others on specific interventions
- Transformative ideas or stories from rural communities
Watch our website and social media pages for more updates on this campaign – coming soon. We hope you will join us in powering the work of the next decade…
#ThePowerOfPossibilities
