I joined Aavishkaar five months into the fellowship. It was a shift from my previous host organization and came as a difficult decision. While I was worried about coping up and settling in, the challenge of starting things over and sticking with this journey I had committed to took over and I dived right back. What I could do for the organisation, where will I be able to contribute, will it be worth the time and effort for me and the organisation, will things work out – these were some of the many questions that continuously surrounded me but so did the willingness to do it all.
The first few tasks involved documenting reports for the camps and training sessions that had happened in the last couple of months. Then, I was required to work on making the annual report, for which I needed to know everything that was done in the previous year. It was a daunting task since I had just joined and knew almost nothing about the activities of the organization. At the same time, there could be no better way to learn about it since it required me to talk to different people, collect data from multiple sources and scan through a pile of documents.
While working on the annual report, I was also given the responsibility to handle the external communication on behalf of the organziation, through its social media channels. It meant that I needed to be up to date with everything that happens on a day-to-day basis. As we progressed, I got a good grip over content and was told that more such work will be directed towards me. While it was a great boost, I also struggled to keep up. It was an uncomfortable position with a lot at stake.
However, somewhere along this exercise of catching up and filling in, I got to know Aavishkaar much faster and deeper than what I had expected. I could see myself immersing in the culture, and aligning with the vision and the mission.
When I was then given the task to make an introductory video for Aavishkaar, I had the confidence to say what we can show, how it could be conceptualized and scripted. As someone between an insider and an outsider, I could frame the essential message to convey as well as could imagine what I would have wanted to see as an audience. The video here, is an attempt to depict that.
Not all the clips are filmed by me, thanks to everyone in the team who kept recording the footage from time to time. I couldn’t have understood the organisation so well if I hadn’t spent the first two months just talking to people, observing every little detail and constantly putting that down into words as a part of reports, documents and Facebook posts. Everything happens for a reason, and while it might seem sometimes that you’re working on something futile, it may turn out to be an important piece of the bigger puzzle.
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