SAMARTH Fellowship Program – India

This opportunity enables young graduates to enhance their cognition, awareness, skills, and competencies, equipping them to take on diverse roles in challenging social change processes.

The SAMARTH Fellowship Program is a 9-month self-leadership program aimed at enhancing the capacities of youth to shape their career paths towards social change. The journey focuses on ensuring that youth enter the social development sphere equipped with the necessary cognition, compassion, and competencies to address intrinsic developmental challenges. The program encourages experiential learning offered by over 200 prestigious social-impact-based Fellowships in India. SAMARTH Fellowship engages youth in three components: self-development, peer activities, and achieving career aspirations through well-defined structural processes.

The leadership program will immerse Fellows into real-life situations faced by social sector practitioners through following channels:

• Aware: Raising awareness about the scope and significance of the social development sector and exposure to entry-level roles in jobs and prestigious fellowships in India.
• Educate: Facilitating a learning curriculum, providing knowledge and skill-building resources, and organizing learning exposure visits. Hosting workshops and sessions to enhance competencies and engage in insightful co-creational activities.
• Empower and Sustain: Building youths’ capacities and fostering a growth mindset through structured processes, channeling them towards social development endeavors. Providing personalized support channels and cocreating prerequisites to help them access aspirational opportunities.

Objectives

• To raise awareness about social development roles through entry-level jobs and fellowships in India.
• To develop learning publications and skill-building resources.
• To build the capacities of youth through structured processes and channel them into social development initiatives.
• To create a community pool of social-empathetic leaders.
• To network with academic institutions, social development professionals, organizations, and governments.

Program Structure

• SAMARTH Fellowship Program is designed with a three-pillared approach to ensure effective capacity building of young leaders:
  • Knowledge: Creating awareness about social development roles, opportunities, and needs identification. Establishing a foundational understanding of public policy, its implementation, and key stakeholders involved.
  • Competencies: Developing organizational skills like communication, documentation, collaboration, strategic planning, and related areas. Also emphasizing the adoption of systems thinking approaches.
  • Aspirational Career Preparation: Crafting personalized resources (such as CVs, cover letters, statements of purpose, letters of intent, portfolios, and connections) to meet the requirements for applying to job and fellowship opportunities in India.

The Uniqueness of SAMARTH Fellowship

• Most Flexible Fellowship: This is a part-time, virtual, and selfdevelopment-focused opportunity and requires engagements of 10-12 hours, every week.
• Democratic values: i.e., of the youths, by the youths, and for the youths. Focused on reaching all the youths of India for awareness, conducting the leadership program with passionate individuals, and ensuring all strategies are devised by the youths.
• Fellowship of Fellowships: This Fellowship will guide and encourage fellows to join prestigious Fellowship opportunities in India.
• Technology-aided-Innovation: Operationalise through every digital platform like website, WhatsApp peer group, e-meets, workshops, in-house publications, learning resources, and personalized conversations.
• Fellowship of expressions: The Fellowship will encourage individual expression in all dimensions like stories, blogs, individual passion, empathetic interactions, and other activities.
• Fellowship of social leaders: This fellowship envisions developing passionate youth to take charge, join the development sector, and build themselves into social leaders with the right cognition, compassion, and competencies.
• People Behind: The team has first-hand lived experiences of pain followed by the gains from over 7 prestigious Indian and International Fellowships altogether.

The SAMARTH Fellowship Services

• SamBodh: A weekly thematic session to build competencies
• FellowMania: A fellow-led co-creational learning platform
• Mentor-संवाद: Personalised mentorship from mid-social leaders
• Opportunity Updates: Weekly Fellowships & Young Professional opportunity alerts and bulletins
• Knowledge Publications & Resources: Aid learning through insightful modules, blogs, books, reports, allies.
• Learning Expo: Participation in bootcamps at different phases and allied learning exposure events.
• Career Saarthi: Building profiles, portfolios, applying opportunities, and hand-holding in aspirational career paths.
• Groomed Implementers: Practice competencies in assigned tasks, peer activities, and external opportunities.
• Professional referrals and recommendations.

Eligibility Criteria

• Must be passionate about working in the social development sector.
• Must be an Indian citizen aged 27 years or younger.
• Must have completed graduation in any field or be in the final year of their course.

For more information, visit Sarva SANDHI Foundation.