In late March, I had the opportunity to travel to Villupuram in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu for a professional visit. I had received a grant through the American India Foundation’s Banyan Impact Fellowship program which provides additional monetary support for Banyan Impact Fellows who want to pursue further learning opportunities related to their project, including exposure visits to other civil society organizations.
In that spirit, I decided to visit Banyan Impact Fellow Akila Muthukumar. Akila is currently serving at the Sristi Foundation in Villupuram which also works to provide employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
Traveling there was relatively straightforward. First, I took a three-hour bus from Ajmer to Jaipur. From Jaipur, I then boarded a flight to Chennai, and despite traveling from the northwestern tip of India to the southeastern tip, the flight was only three hours. After arriving in Chennai, I met the cab driver who then drove me three hours up the coast to Akila’s work site. As a boy, I had visited the state of Montana and was told by a local that to travel to Montana was to travel back in time, to when humanity fitted into nature, not the other way around as is the case today. As bizarre as it sounds, traveling up to Villupuram from Chennai, my mind slipped back to Montana. Tamil Nadu was so green and lush that, despite all of the development, the thick green forest could swallow our car at any moment. It was beautiful.
Over the next three days, I would have a number of insightful conversations and get the chance to meet inspirational changemakers, but I am struck by one conversation I had with the director of Sristi Foundation, Mr. Karthikeyan Ganesan. I confessed that my placement efforts had largely stalled. I had organized a job fair that was well attended, it seemed in the moment that employers had taken an interest in candidates, but in the months that followed, I found it difficult to contact candidates and many employers reported that their candidates had simply stopped showing up for work or had been let go for behavioral problems. When I explained my problem to Mr. Ganesan, he explained that in employment focused work, it was important to center the beneficiary. He went on to explain that it can take years to train beneficiaries at Sristi Foundation before they are able to be placed into jobs successfully, and that within that it can sometimes take five or six different placements to find one that fits for beneficiaries.
Despite having worked in the recruitment space in the past, I had not stopped to consider how working in the non-profit ought to have changed my calculus. In the for-profit sector, the client is the one who pays the recruiters’ fees and so the focus of the recruiter is on building relationships with employers. Relationships with candidates are also important but are secondary in nature. If the goal of the recruiter is to make as much money as possible placing candidates, then this is a logical approach. However, this is the wrong approach if your goal is to create lasting employment for people with disabilities.
I realized that my approach of working with employers to identify hiring needs and then facilitating candidate interviews was fundamentally wrong. I realized that, while I knew multiple employers on first-name basis, I was much less familiar with the beneficiaries, and despite having met hundreds of beneficiaries, I had spent comparatively little time developing relationships with them. Put simply, I was putting the cart before the horse. Since returning to Rajasthan Mahila Kalyan Mandal, my host organization in Ajmer, I have taken a number of steps to implement a beneficiary-centric model. In the course of organizing a job fair for people with disabilities, I had collected one hundred and fifty or so resumes and I had them stored as a single PDF. This was cumbersome and was not reflective of the more individual focused approach I wanted to implement. I took all of the resumes and translated them from Hindi to English. I then uploaded all the candidates onto a free online candidate management platform. This allows me to search candidates by gender, skills and prior work experience. My colleague Surendra Gujar and I then reached out to all the candidates to get updates on their work statuses and locations. We also took note of their fathers names and their current addresses. This information had largely been neglected in the initial batch of resumes.
What emerged from Mr. Ganesan was that employment for a person with disabilities is not the first step towards empowerment. Rather, employment is the end result of a long process of training. In that spirit, we have begun to organize our own cohort for employment training. At present we are working to organize twenty or so people who would be interested in vocational training. We then plan to apply for a grants that will allow us to fund vocational training. We hope that this approach will lead to more sustainable results. I am so grateful to AIF for providing the funding to allow me to continue to learn and develop as a professional.
