Meet People Beyond Borders, a startup of NSRCEL from the Social Incubation Program. The program engages and supports early-stage social ventures with high growth potential to build scalable models for sustained impact.
People Beyond Borders (PBB) is a youth-led non-profit that connects displaced communities with each other and fosters self-empowerment, livelihood, psychosocial support, and skill-sharing. With inclusive and creative practices, PBB engages displaced communities and refugees to hone entrepreneurial skills and inspire creativity that translates into social impact.
Led by co-founders, Prerna Rathi and Angela Miller McGraw, PBB works towards its mission of cultivating a culture of care, belonging, and dignity for those fleeing humanitarian crises.
People Beyond Borders has been involved in ground-breaking work over the past few weeks in Berlin, Germany, with Sofie Roehrig, PBB’s Creative Consultant, and a Berlin-based multimedia visual artist and Ph.D. researcher focusing on migration politics.
In the run-up to World Refugee Week, People Beyond Borders has been reaching out to refugees and displaced communities in Germany with curated activities, workshops, and discussions that empower these communities, offer skill support, and build on the intercultural connections among these groups.
Art, music, poetry, film, dance, and sports are languages of empowerment that bridge connections beyond labels, identities, and borders. With an art-jamming event, conflict mapping session, residential theatre workshop, and a visit to the Innovative Psychotherapy Clinic at Humboldt University in Berlin to collect resources and set up a referral mechanism for refugees seeking mental health support, and much more, PBB is actively helping displaced people to express themselves, humanize their everyday narratives and transform barriers through trust-building.
“Displaced communities often experience roadblocks in their path towards employment and experiencing their sense of belongingness. People Beyond Borders works to synergize the power of community through these partnerships with organizations and most importantly, with marginalized people themselves,” said Prerna Rathi.
With every single one of its initiatives, People Beyond Borders is on its way towards bridging gaps through co-creating safe spaces and opportunities to empower displaced groups to connect with each other and tap into diverse support systems.
Founded by Rizvi Aquil Abbas, Voyage Educare Foundation has been actively transforming society by facilitating education programs for children from low-income communities and training programs for teachers.
Over the past few weeks, Voyage Educare has been working round-the-clock, conducting its flagship training program, Raabta across the country. Raabta – School Transformation Program (STP) aims to uplift and transform schools, thus building meaningful relationships between stakeholders responsible for a child’s holistic education. Raabta implements insights from nationally and internationally conducted research across best practices for schools.
Socio-economic factors often discourage children from being a part of the formal education system. Voyage EduCare Foundation, through Raabta, builds connections among students, teachers, and parents and contributes towards making formal education accessible and efficient for children all across.
The May 2022 Leg of the program took place in Kashmir, Kargil and Leh. The sessions covered concepts of learning loss, and culture-building and aimed at fostering a positive learning environment and encouraging parents to invest and take charge of their child’s education.
This school transformation program takes underserved schools across the country and converts them into lighthouse schools that nurture and improve learning experiences and outcomes. Through Raabta, key stakeholders get to share their resources and expertise with schools in the vicinity and eventually improve the standards of education in the region.
“It has been an incredible feeling being on the ground after a long time. The responses from teachers and the community have helped me realize the importance of the work we are doing.”, said Rizvi, Founder of Voyage Educare Foundation.
With improved operations and clarity in structure, the program has brought about the progress that is visible through improved teacher retention, parental participation, and a spike in student engagement and attendance.
With Voyage Educare Foundation’s dedicated efforts, we surely are certain of seeing the immediate change that they wish to bring about, one school at a time!