Each year, the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship awards $5,000 seed grants to fund the launch or early-stage growth of a project, program, or venture.
Outspoken is an online interactive communication and skill-building program preparing women with essential skills to enter the workforce. Founders Akansha Singh ’23 and team are building a platform to enhance foundational English skills and give exposure on essential life skills for students. Below is the first of their three reports.
Who We Are:
Outspoken is an online interactive communication and skill-building program preparing women who have already received a basic education and wish to enter the workforce, but are missing essential skills such as English communication, and a basic and technical preparedness to function optimally in the workforce. We focus on enhancing foundational English literacy and communication skills (one of the biggest lacunas amongst female graduates in India), whilst giving exposure on livelihood preparedness, entrepreneurship, available options to earn, schemes and programs, development issues, ways to get loans from banks and more to ensure sustainable impact on their lives.
Our Updates and Developments:
It has been a crazy and enriching summer 2022. Through the generous PCSE seed grant, our project has taken its wings into new frontiers. There have been challenges which were met with new learning curves and change. We embraced the pitfalls that drove us as a team to return to the drawing board with new vigour and enthusiasm.
Outspoken was conceptualised with a vision to develop a voice for the youth through unconventional and ground-breaking paths.
DEVELOPMENTS:
CURRICULUM– After careful consideration and discussions, our team decided to appoint an evaluation committee to critique the curriculum. We have already received in-depth feedback for the elementary level program and have started making edits and reviewing suggestions. This will then be shared with the video editor for further consideration.
We have also begun scripting and curriculum development of our advanced levels lessons.
MVP– We have spoken to some local beneficiaries and orphanages in Ranchu and have collaborated to offer our program for a beta testing. This is being tested at present. We feel that this endeavour would give us critical and valuable feedback from our target market- our students
NEW TEAM INDUCTION: With new curriculum requirements, came in new team requirements. We welcomed two freelance content developers. One of them is a Wesleyan student minoring in Education Studies, who will be working on scripts for our advanced level. Our second intern is a digital artist. She is bringing our mini-readers alive through fantastic illustrations, as shown below.
NEW APPS/TECH: Our R/D team created various new samples using new tech and apps like storyboard, genially and Canva pro. It is exciting to learn and see the amount of great resources to support new learning. We hope to take up some subscriptions soon.
ACCREDITATION: Simultaneously, we have been exploring various accreditation collaborations like ASIC and APPETD.