Buoyed by the success of the nationwide Design for Giving Contest 2009, which attracted entries from 60,000 students of 32,274 primary-secondary schools across the country, Kiran Bir Sethi, the promoter-principal of the Ahmedabad-based IGCSE (UK) board-affiliated Riverside School, is poised to take the contest international under a new title — Design for Change 2010.
“The objective of the DFC contest is to make children aware of the pressing needs of their communities, to empower them to provide solutions and implement them. The format of the contest which starts in June is very simple: students select a change idea, register it with us between June-September 15, implement it within their local constituencies by October 2 and send us a story of the idea, its implementation and outcome by October 15. The top 100 winners of DFC 2010 will be announced on November 14 which is Children’s Day. Some of the narratives we received last year spanned diverse concepts such as Save our Mangroves; Help Reach the Unreachable; Protection of the Homeless; Stop Child Marriages Plan; and Teaching Illiterate Parents to Read and Write. The over-riding objective of the DFC is to make children believe they matter and to consciously infuse their minds with the ‘I Can’ spirit,” says Sethi, an alumna of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and former Times of India columnist, television actress and rock band singer who founded the new genre Riverside School in 2001. Currently this K-9 school has an aggregate enrolment of 330 students instructed by 64 teachers.
Quite obviously given that the scale and canvas of DFC 2010 is much bigger, the logistics and other challenges will be more formidable this year. The expectation is to receive change stories from 250,000 students from 50,000 schools in 18 countries who have already registered their ideas on the contest’s website (dfcglobal@gmail. com). Last year, Sethi was successful in attracting some of the world’s top education institutions and design firms for DFG 2009. Among them: NID, Stanford Design School and the Harvard School of Education, IDEA, and Walt Disney Co.
For the more ambitious global DFC 2010 while NID, Stanford Design School, IDEO (a US-based design firm), Design Observer and “a great panel of judges” have already come on board, Sethi is still looking for sponsors and other partners. “We need all the help we can get as evaluation and assessment of the thousands of stories we are expecting from schools and students around the world is certain to be a mammoth task. We will shortlist 100 best narratives and award prizes to the top 20 under various categories. We need committed partners to help us make DFC 2010 the world’s largest creative ideas contest for children,” says Sethi.
For the growing number of CSR (corporate social responsibility)-committed companies, that’s a good offer.
Dilip Thakore (Bangalore/ Ahmedabad)