Design Impact / Earn Learn

I’d always held two ambitions in my life. One was to travel through India and the second was to use my skills as a designer to help others. As part of the Design Impact fellowship I was able to achieve both of these dreams in a way I never thought possible. I found myself living in the Gandhi Ashram, home to a spiritual movement that resulted in Indian independence, and spent 6 months working with NGO Manav Sadhna on their programme Earn n Learn, a programme that helps local children by providing them with a safe alternative to street labour. I was asked by Manav Sadhna to design a website for Earn n Learn that would help convey the culture of the programme. With this work I was aiming to achieve three things:

1. Establish the core values of the programme and articulate those values through visual and written language.
2. Work closely with the programme co-ordinators and agree on ways of designing with the children.
3. Improve the connection between the children and the products and translate that into a powerful story about empowerment and not charity.

Working on this project was unique, challenging and extremely rewarding. The facilitation skills I developed working with Designing Dublin combined with the knowledge of brand that I developed during my Masters at Bath Spa prepared me very well for this work. To get a deeper insight into what it was like, take a look at the ISSUU presentation.

Note: Owing to other priorities, it was another two years before NGO Manav Sadhna were able to launch the Earn Learn site. Although different to my proposed mockups, the final website shares similarities in terms of look and feel and site structure. More importantly it achieves all of the goals we were working towards: conveying the culture of the programme in a way that is rich and meaningful.