Emptying and Retaining
Coming into the AIF Banyan Impact Fellowship orientation, I noticed something about myself. Whenever a session began, whether it was on public health, climate, M&E, fundraising, or project management, my first instinct was to immediately relate it to something I had seen earlier in the field. Although I knew my earlier experiences were small in scale and limited in scope, my mind unconsciously kept returning to them, using that small set of experiences as a reference point for everything new I heard.
This had two sides. On one side, it felt good. I could internally connect what I was listening to with real situations I had encountered. That made me feel there is growth within, and that I had a base of understanding which helped me make sense of new concepts. But there was another side to it. When I constantly connected everything only to what I had seen before, I was unintentionally setting boundaries around new thoughts and ideas. I realized that if I kept doing this, I would be restricting myself to the comfort of familiar experiences instead of allowing space for new perspectives. So I made a conscious effort to remind myself to stop interpreting everything through a few scenes.
A few villages, a few communities, a handful of field experience are definitely not the whole truth. I recognized that retaining some aspects of my previous interventions will add depth, but it is equally important to keep emptying the cup.
And interestingly, even before fully absorbing the content of the orientation sessions, this awareness itself became my first takeaway.
Orientation & People
While all the orientation sessions were insightful in their own ways, two stood out for me personally — Public Health and Community & Theatre. The Public Health session began by giving a clear, structured overview of how the entire public health system functions in India. It connected the dots, explained the existing frameworks, and helped me understand how different programs and systems work together in the public health space. The Community & Theatre workshop was the other session I enjoyed the most. It was light, fun, and full of movement. The facilitator created a space where we could play, reflect, and engage together naturally.
Beyond the orientation sessions, one of the most valuable aspects was the range of resource people and networks we were introduced to. Each of them came with expertise, systems understanding, and clarity about various domains. It reminded me of how many different pathways to impact and forms of contribution exist within the development space. The Fellows, too, brought diverse domain experiences, expertise, and personal stories, making the cohort truly diverse. And definitely, the program team was a key part from the very beginning. I felt that they carried a very strong sense of professionalism, with the right mix of structure and comfort, which made it easy to reach out, ask questions, and seek support.
With that, I felt settled, supported, and well-oriented to begin the Fellowship journey with my host organization, Pudiyador .
