RISHI Projects
Project RISHI at UCLA is committed to creating lasting change through our diverse campaigns and programs. While we maintain a clear mission, we employ a broad range of strategies to address critical issues within the South Asian community, including water sanitation, healthcare, and women's and community empowerment.
Learn more about our initiatives and get involved yourself.
Community Empowerment
About Our Project
Through our projects in Vadamanappakkam, Tamil Nadu, Project RISHI has worked with students from local schools to promote youth empowerment through leadership development and community engagement initiatives. Our Community Empowerment Team is dedicated to helping partner stakeholders identify both personal and community goals to improve educational and career development. The team aims to connect rural communities with the educational resources and opportunities that can help them pursue and achieve those goals. Community Empowerment will work with NGO partners to bridge both financial and geographic barriers that villages and students face in accessing important educational and career resources.
Photovoice
Through our past partnerships with the schools of Vadamanappakam, our team identified that students had limited opportunities to explore creative self-expression and leadership development. This project's goal was to help students discover outlets for creative expression that directly empowered them to own and foster their narrative voices. To accomplish this, the students learned about the power of photography as an avenue of self-empowerment, and also allowed us to learn about the lives and issues experienced by young people within the community directly from student perspectives. We worked with Photovoice – a UK-based nonprofit focused on using photography to invigorate communities worldwide– to create a multi-day photojournalism curriculum that would be led by Project RISHI members in person. In this partnership, ten students participated in a three-day workshop series that involved capturing photos of their community and reflecting on what those photos represent to them. Additionally, this project aimed to allow students to express themselves through previously unavailable artistic mediums. At the end of the project, Project RISHI gained valuable insight regarding the perspectives of the secondary school students.
Mural Project
After conversations with school faculty members in Vadamanappakkam, we learned about the increase in juvenile delinquency within the community after the COVID-19 pandemic, when access to school resources and environment were limited. In understanding the importance of schools as not only education centers but also safe spaces for children, we asked the students to help us create and paint a mural at the school with the goal of promoting pride, collaboration, and creativity amongst the students. Our hope was that this project would help the students understand how their personal contributions to positive change within the school would have collective benefits for everyone, including accountability, responsibility, and dignity in keeping the school a safe space.