Volunteering for TFI

The moment I saw Teach for India as one of the citi community initiatives I signed up and the in the next 10 mins 20 seats were filled up. I could not get my friend Sid register for it. We wanted to do it together and so I was wondering whether I should de-register and sign up for some other event. I was browsing the site and I found suddenly the seats had increased to 30. I got Sid to sign up and managed to convince one more friend of mine Megha to sign up.
On the D-day we landed up at Chowpatty we were quite early for the event. CCD was not open and so we decided to walk on the beach. We were quite apprehensive as how we could go back to that college atmosphere and get people to sign up for Teach for India.Our event coordinator Shaheen Mistry CEO of Teach for India and founder of Akansha was a very pleasant lady and she was quite happy to know that we have quite some information about teach for India. But she was slightly disappointed at the turnout, only 10 out of the 30 (who had registered) had turned up for the event.As she explained about the event, this was quite different from Teach for India which was being advertised in the newspapers. They were on the look out for 100 graduates for a 2 year fellowship program who would undergo a rigorous in-house training and then get on to teach in government schools in remote areas of Mumbai and Pune. Since big corporate houses would be involved and they have plans to scale it up in the coming years on the lines of Teach for America, they have a mechanism to pay these fellows a stipend of 15000. But the challenge was to find that 1 percent of crowd who were deeply motivated and committed to spread education in the country. This is where we as employees of citi had to play to a role.
We were split into small groups and were assigned a college in south mumbai. We were supposed to spread information about this new initiative of teach for India and get the contact details of those who might make the cut for this program. I was imagining myself in college and if somebody like this turned up I would have probably not even shown the patience to listen or my notorious friends who would had their dose of fun at the expense of such volunteers.When we landed in Elphinstone we were quite apprehensive , we could not locate our single point of contact Prof. Vyaas. So we decided to stick together and students were looking at our T-shirt
which brightly announced Citi Global Volunteer day. In fact a couple of students stopped us and enquired what we were up to. We explained patiently what this initiative is and they guided us onto our first contact who might be interested or might know somebody is interested. After explaining to this new guy (who was referred to as Bavaji) for around 20 minutes he told us he was not interested, and that hes more of a introvert and that he didnt know anyone out there. So me and Sid had our first experience of what we would have done to such volunteers. But by then Megha had got the permission from the head of IT department to speak to a class.
Suddenly we had to address a entire class and Megha in a quick transformation was speaking loudly somewhat like Hillary Clinton campaigning for the primaries. I was taken aback, there were times I would ask her on why the issue was handled in a particular way it would take quite some time for the sound to travel the half yard distance from her cubicle to mine. I chose to take a back seat because Megha was turning out to be an excellent speaker. I was studying the responses of 60 0dd students in class who were listening quite attentively to Megha. Initially I could see students working on their assignments but as we drilled down the importance of this program the interest levels were growing. When we would pester them to ask questions quite a few enthusiastic students asked questions about the program and how it would help them in the long run. I was afraid to conclude our lecture because we were about to pose that dreaded question how many would be interested to sign up.
As soon as that question was posed I could see hands raised from each row and yes it was a great feeling. We had converted a good number to our cause and even the young teacher was interested. During all of these 45 mins Sid was missing from the scene and when he came back he looked like a man who has won the war. He had a list with him , which had the names and contacts of those students who were good in academics or sports or extra curricular activities -- the focus group for Teach for India.
At the outset we were afraid that whether we could manage even a single contact and by the end we had managed close to 50 students who would be contacted by Teach for India.