E3 Program Details
E3 PROGRAM DETAILS :
TAPPING YOUNG PEOPLE'S TALENT BEFORE THEY END UP PULLING CARTS
So much talent lies dormant on the streets of India’s many cities. Young men and women have no hope for the better future a good job can provide, often simply because of the caste and family they were born into.
So they grow up impoverished. Illiterate. Unaware of basic social customs or what a healthy lifestyle and healthy family look like.
Their only job prospects are pulling carts, selling fruit in the street, cleaning houses – at best. At worst, they’ll become addicts,
, alcoholics, gang members, criminals, and ultimately, beggars.
But they weren’t born that way. And they don’t have to end up that way. E3 Job Growth was created to interrupt this well-worn path to self- and social-destruction.
With your help, E3 will one day upend the very nature of Indian society, blow apart caste discrimination, and liberate a generation from what used to be a guaranteed destiny of destitution.
You basically have to do what nursing and elder care homes in wealthier countries do, but without all the systemic support people in western countries take for granted.
Disabled people in India need all the same things people everywhere else need:
E3 OVERVIEW - 1 YEAR, 3 STEPS TO GOOD JOBS
E3 stands for Education, Employment, and Empowerment. It’s a 1-year program that takes working or aspiring young men and women (ages 14-30) and prepares them with communication, life, and employability skills.
The goal is to give every participant a new future. One where they can qualify for jobs in fields like reception, clerical, hotels, customer service, and non-technical administration.
This isn’t a college degree. It’s vocational training for people who may have little to no education. We’re not creating computer scientists or business owners. We’re empowering people who have nothing to be able to do something that pays well enough to build a family and a better life.
Each skill module provides the basic training necessary to succeed in these better job opportunities. There are three modules, one for each ‘E’.
Education Module: Communication Skills
Many of our participants are illiterate or semi-literate. They will begin by learning to read and write in their native language, as well as some basic spoken English. This module takes 12-20 weeks to complete, depending on the skills they come in with.
Empowerment Module: Life Skills
To get a job is one thing. To keep it and grow in it – that’s how system-wide change will happen. But people who’ve been raised on the streets in terrible suffering and hunger often lack basic life skills that are vital to most jobs.
This module teaches skills like self-awareness and empathy (other-awareness), how to cope with stress and negative emotions, interpersonal relationships, decision-making, and more. This module also takes 12-20 weeks to complete.
Employability Module: Skills to Get Jobs
Life skills are good, but all they do is lay a foundation. To actually qualify for some of these jobs, participants need employable skills. In this final module, they learn about hygiene, customer service training, job interviewing, computer skills, and more. This module takes 8-12 weeks to complete.
For people with some prior knowledge, they can complete the whole program in about 7 months. But most people will need a full year to get through it. Once finished, they enter the final stage.
Final Step: Job Placement
We work with various companies and organizations to help E3 participants get their first jobs after completing the program. We mentor them, prepare them for their interviews, and help them get established in their jobs.
WHERE DO WE FIND PARTICIPANTS?
We’re looking for motivated people who are stuck in a system that works against their success. Ideally, these are working young people, or young people who have shown a desire to do something better than what they see around them.
Various local organizations, charities, training centres, and government organizations will finally have a place to refer people who come to them for help, and who show all the promise and potential to succeed if just given a chance. E3 gives them a chance.
THEIR FIRST 'BANK SAVINGS' SUCCESS
Each person admitted to the E3 program will have to pay a very small monthly fee. The point of this fee isn’t to keep people out, but to motivate them to persevere through the next year or so and finish the program.
This works because at the end of the program, they will get all their money back, plus interest! So they come out of the program with a nice amount of money saved up – probably the first time in their lives they’ve saved money.
Ways You Can Help the E3 Job Growth Program Empower Thousands
For each participant to go through the full E3 program costs $1450, about $120 per month. We hope to take 200 people through each year
YOU CAN HELP MAKE THE E3 A SUCCESS IN ANY OF THE FOLLOWING WAYS:
One-Time Gifts.
Every bit helps. Large one-time gifts enable us to cover one-time costs, or admit a certain number of people, however many it covers
Recurring E3 Partnership
For every $120 given per month, we can admit another young man or woman into E3. Recurring gifts are the single best way to make this program a success.
Business Sponsorships
This is all about jobs. If you want to position your company as a job-creator that cares about helping people get and keep good jobs, sponsoring E3 is a terrific way to publicize your commitment. All E3 business sponsors will get special mention in the media and all our outreach materials.
See below for more details about the specific classes in the E3 Job Growth program.
SPECIFIC COURSES IN EACH E3 MODULE
The three main modules – communication, life skills, and employability – each have multiple classes within them. Here’s a course-by-course list – in the order they are taken.
EDUCATION: COMMUNICATION SKILLS COURSES
Communication Skills – Basic Literacy
Many participants may not be able to read or write, even in their native language. This is the first course taken, because literacy is the foundation.
It uses a variety of teaching methods, and ends with an assessment.
Duration: 12-16 weeks
Communication Skills – Post-Basic
For participants who either already possess some basic literacy, or those who complete the first course but want to learn more, the Post-Basic course takes literacy to the next level.
This course begins in their local language, but later incorporates simple English at the level required to work in the jobs E3 qualifies people to work in. It also concludes with a test to prove sufficient mastery.
Duration: 12-16 weeks
ESOL – English for Speakers of Other Languages
This is a special five-part curriculum that has been used by other NGOs that equips people with English skills in the contexts they’ll need to succeed, such as interviews and phone calls.
It’s a skill-enhancement program that teaches situational fluency in English. This program is appropriate for people who have completed or are overqualified for the first two Communication Skills courses.
Duration: Varies
EMPOWERMENT: LIFE SKILLS COURSES
There are 10 Life Skills courses in the E3 program. They’re based on a report created for UNESCO. The report talks about the four pillars of education, on which these Life Skills courses are built.
The point is simple – without these skills, you can’t learn much else that’s useful to most employers. You can’t manage your own life without these skills either.
The four pillars of education are:
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Learning to Know (how to learn)
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Learning to Do (how to act)
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Learning to Live Together (how to get along with others)
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Learning to Be (how to be okay with yourself)
Here are the 10 Life Skills courses that arose out of those four foundational pillars :
Self-Awareness
Who am I? What is my place in this world, my city, my country, my family? Or my job? This is philosophical but also very practical. People need to know how they fit into the world, and this includes rights and duties to ourselves and others. This is the first skill taught.
Effective Communication
Typical students in normal schools just kind of “know” how to get along with teachers and other students, for the most part. But the young people in the E3 program, many of whom have grown up surviving off garbage tossed away by street merchants, those skills are a distant mystery.
This class gets into context, word choice and sentence structure, and tone, and the role these play in communication. This is about listening and comprehension. This course includes lots of practice.
Coping with Emotions
Too often, Indian society shames emotion and tries to force people into a stoic, non-emotional state, in denial of what’s raging inside. No wonder mental illness is also so common here.
Learning to admit your emotions is the first step to coping with them. From there, we can teach people how to manage them, since the other extreme of completely giving into emotions doesn’t work too well in most job settings either. This course helps people become more fully human.
Coping with Stress
Most slum dwellers have grown up witnessing terrible suffering and violence. It’s easy to be deadened to it, and most don’t know how to deal with stress in healthy ways. This course begins the process of learning to work through stress, including group discussion and therapy.
Decision-Making
Indians value group decision-making more than individuals. But to enter and succeed in the job market, these participants will need a bit more skill in making their own choices and speaking about them in a productive way.
This course uses debate as one way to reveal individual differences, and teaches how beliefs and opinions can be defended with logic.
Problem Solving
This course focuses on logical, spatial, and mechanical problem solving, in groups and individually. The goal is to teach how to work through challenging situations and find solutions, rather than give up or get in arguments, or even violence.
Creative Thinking
This is a hard topic, but it needs to be introduced here so the participants start to realize different situations have different ways they can be interpreted and worked through.
Creative thinking is about finding new answers to old questions, and uses both logic and intuition. It’s less about the “right” answer, and more about how you got there. Sometimes the accepted ‘wisdom’ isn’t necessarily the best path forward. The caste system is a good example of this, since that accepted system deliberately keeps people chained to crushing poverty and tells them they deserve it because of something they did in a former life.
Critical Thinking
This is the other side of creative thinking. Finding logical and rational question to ask and solutions to find. Being able to catch errors in reasoning. This is more about data and evidence to prove a point or an opinion.
Empathy
The goal of this course is to help people think about others who are not like them, and learn to see the world through their eyes. The more we empathize, the better we treat other people, and the environment. We want to build in and ‘other-awareness’ here so our participants will begin to see the world differently. How their actions affect others, and why people act the ways they do.
This is a huge skill for anyone to succeed in a job long term.
Interpersonal Relationships
This course comes last because it incorporates elements of many of the others. How to deal with stress and emotions, how to empathize, how to work together to solve problems – these skills all play out in relationships. Especially family ones.
Since most of our participants come from difficult family situations, they’ll have a lot of source material to draw on and build from. The goal here is to start learning how to offer support, advice, or even criticism when appropriate, and delivered in a respectful manner.
Here’s a graphic that summarizes these 10 Life Skills.
EMPLOYABILITY SKILLS COURSES
Once equipped for success with basic communication and life skills, our participants are ready for the final step. They’re ready to learn what it takes to enter the world of employment with a future.
We want to produce a continuous stream of clerks, customer service specialists, retail workers, security guards, receptionists – almost any job of this sort.
We teach 9 different skills that enable participants to get these kinds of jobs in Calcutta and beyond. It will get them off the streets and out of a no-future life of poverty and apathy. In time, it will change the face of Indian culture and wipe out extreme poverty for future families.
This module has been fully certified by the Association of Integrative Psychology, USA. Upon completion participants receive official certificates they can be proud of and use as part of their resumes.
Here are the 9 employability skills :
Self-Image: Hygiene and Grooming
Some people from India’s slums have zero experience with basic hygiene. They just weren’t in a place where it mattered. But now it does. Body odour, clothing, hair, breath, general appearance – this all matters in the kinds of jobs they’ll be working. This course includes a role play component.
Communication Techniques
Notice how there’s a communication piece in all three modules? Are you a master communicator yet? We spend our whole lives learning how to communicate well. Our participants need all the help they can get in this area.
This course focuses on common communication problems that can hold them back. It also goes into non-verbal messaging, active listening, and learning how to converse and work toward understanding.
Understanding Strengths and Weaknesses
In many ways this is the most important course in the entire E3 program. It’s about how to develop a plan to get what you want out of life.
Creating routines, developing winning attitudes, setting a vision for your future, avoiding procrastination pushing past setbacks – this is the course that gives them a plan for life, and a vision to strive for.
Preparing for Interviews
This is yet another skill that is completely foreign to someone who grew up with nothing. We want our participants to enter their interviews with confidence. That means preparing resumes, dressing for the part, rehearsing common questions, body language, attitude, first impressions – all those things that help anyone shine in a job interview.
Getting Along In the Workplace
Conflict happens. But in the workplace, you need to be able to work through it and not let it destroy you. One really bad response to a workplace conflict could send a still fragile success story back down to the streets where life is predictable, if miserable.
This course teaches five conflict resolution styles and when to use them and how to think first before reacting.
620
Kids Getting Educated
218
Successful Projects
5137
People served
13
Awards Won