Outlook Business | WoW 2017: Gloria Benny on improving childcare
Guardian of Dreams co-founder Gloria Benny makes a case for why childcare must not be a privilege for few but the norm for all
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Music: Vodovoz Music Productions
#GloriaBenny #Childcare #WOW2017 #Business #OutlookBusiness #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup
Read the stories of all the 17 women achievers profiled this year https://www.outlookbusiness.com/speci...
You can also find the edition on the Outlook Group app or buy a digital copy from Magzter
Download Outlook Group: http://app.outlookindia.com/
Digital copy: http://subscription.outlookindia.com/...
Music: Vodovoz Music Productions
#GloriaBenny #Childcare #WOW2017 #Business #OutlookBusiness #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup
Transcript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 Well, ladies and gentlemen, before I
00:05 invite our next speaker for this evening,
00:08 there's something that I want you to take a look at.
00:10 [VIDEO PLAYBACK]
00:16 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:21 - What is a dream?
00:22 A dream could be something from our imagination, our desire,
00:26 and ambition.
00:29 Our children's dreams are the nation's future.
00:32 Their dreams today have the potential
00:35 to be tomorrow's reality.
00:36 Many of us have the care, love, protection,
00:42 and support that we needed.
00:44 But for 40% of India's children who
00:46 are in need of care and protection,
00:49 that's not the case.
00:50 As a society, if we want to get where we want to get,
00:57 a place where supporting children's dreams
01:00 is the norm and not a privilege, we
01:03 need to decide and make that happen instead
01:05 of just giving us sympathy.
01:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:16 - May I now welcome Miss Gloria Benne.
01:19 Miss Gloria is the co-founder of one
01:22 of India's fastest growing youth volunteer network
01:25 called Make a Difference and Guardian of Dreams,
01:29 a platform that empowers youth to become change leaders.
01:32 Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome her
01:34 with a huge round of applause.
01:35 Miss Benne, thank you.
01:37 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:43 - Good evening, everyone.
01:44 It's an honor to be here today.
01:51 It's like some of you just said, it's
01:53 humbling to hear all the stories of women who
01:57 have gone above and beyond, in a lot of ways
02:03 gone beyond the limits that society sets for us
02:06 and becomes a shining light for the rest of the next generation
02:10 to come in.
02:12 My name is Gloria Benne, and I run a nonprofit organization
02:16 called Guardians of Dreams.
02:20 And it's interesting because today I'm
02:22 going to talk about a topic which
02:24 I think us women are great at.
02:28 It's the mother of all causes, child care.
02:32 Yes, pun intended.
02:33 So to start with, back in 2015, all of the UN member states
02:43 got together and basically came up
02:46 with a curated list of 17 sustainable development goals.
02:51 And world over, all countries came together and said,
02:54 these are the 17 goals that we want
02:57 to strive to achieve by 2030.
03:01 So if you run through this list, you'll
03:04 notice that there are themes of ending poverty,
03:08 of fighting injustice and inequality,
03:12 of tackling climate change by 2030.
03:16 But if you take a closer look at this list,
03:20 there's something that's quite discomforting.
03:23 And surprisingly, something that seems
03:25 to be very, very important and an important facet
03:29 of human development that seems to be missing.
03:32 The words child, childhood, and child care.
03:40 And on the other side, when I think about it,
03:47 it's not surprising.
03:48 It's actually symptomatic of a larger issue.
03:52 The issue is that clearly, child care or child development
03:58 as a topic or as a sector itself seem to be ignored,
04:04 or we're not acknowledging that sector in its whole.
04:08 And if you look at-- and there are other examples of this
04:17 as well-- if you look at what is the best--
04:24 or rather, let's look at this, which is that,
04:27 why is child care so important?
04:30 And by not acknowledging child care as a holistic sector,
04:35 how is that manifesting in the kind of interventions
04:38 that we're designing our society around?
04:41 What's happening, actually, is that a lot
04:43 of the organized efforts in the space that
04:46 is dealing with children, because child care as a sector
04:49 is not fully defined, is confining itself
04:53 to just narrow fragments of the overall topic.
04:57 For example, there's a lot of emphasis on education,
04:59 and rightly so.
05:01 There is some emphasis on nutrition,
05:02 and there's a lot of effort happening in that area.
05:06 There is also effort on prevention of abuse, and so on.
05:10 But those are just three different fragments
05:13 of a larger topic or a larger banner called child care.
05:17 Now, let's think about this.
05:19 If all of us in our room, when we were young
05:21 and when we were children, if these
05:23 were the only three inputs that we received,
05:26 which is great quality education, where
05:28 we had sufficient nutrition, and safety and protection
05:31 from abuse, would we be where we are,
05:35 and would we achieve things in life
05:38 without the other aspects that we had and have received,
05:42 which is love, care, attention, exposure to opportunities,
05:46 possibly even having that one adult or parent around
05:49 who egged us on till we became, I would say,
05:54 positive adults in life?
05:57 Not really, right?
05:59 Exactly.
05:59 That's exactly the problem with child care just not being
06:04 looked at holistically, but just the focus
06:06 being on different fragments.
06:09 But then, if all of us could be where we are today,
06:13 something about the kind of child care we received
06:16 has worked.
06:18 And if we look deeper, we'll notice
06:19 how somehow families falling into the middle class
06:24 and above brackets have been consistently and effectively
06:28 been producing positive adults, irrespective of where
06:33 the child's born or which country the child's born into,
06:36 be it India or Pakistan, Vietnam or US.
06:40 If you happen to be born into a family that
06:42 is middle class or above, the likelihood of you achieving
06:46 financial stability, the likelihood
06:47 that you have received sufficient nutrition,
06:50 of not getting into trouble with law and order, all of this
06:53 seems to be phenomenally high.
06:54 So then the question is that, what exactly
07:01 are these middle class and above families getting right?
07:05 What is their micro societal approach
07:08 to child care that seems to be working so well,
07:11 while larger state missionaries seem to be missing this?
07:15 And we look a little deeper, we notice
07:17 how families are not focused on just the childhood inputs
07:23 or how to effectively and efficiently deliver it,
07:27 but they're basically willing to throw everything and invest
07:31 everything in the child that would achieve the end outcome.
07:36 There lays a sharp focus on just purely getting a child
07:41 to become a positive adult. That is what is clearly
07:46 making the difference between how child care is looked
07:49 at within a family unit and what is looked
07:52 at outside of a family unit.
07:57 So let's say families are great at child care,
08:02 then the question to ask is, then why not leave child care
08:05 to just families to take care of?
08:08 Why not the state and the larger society
08:11 focus on things that families don't take care of,
08:14 which is let's say, livelihood or tackling climate change?
08:18 Why not just leave child care to allowing families
08:21 to take care of children?
08:23 Oh well, we don't really have an easy way out
08:25 on this one either.
08:27 The ground reality asks us to rethink this approach.
08:32 A report that's published by SOS Village
08:35 shows that there are actually in India alone
08:38 two crore children who are at risk,
08:43 who are classified orphans, who are outside the family unit,
08:49 or rather two crore children for whom the family unit has failed.
08:55 Now the question is, are we as a society
08:57 going to allow these two crore children to just be
09:01 and wait for circumstances to play with their lives?
09:05 Or are we as a society going to take responsibility
09:07 for these two crore children who happen to not be born
09:11 into great families, but still can have the potential
09:15 to grow into people like you and I?
09:16 And what that means is, as a larger society,
09:24 as a state, we must figure out how
09:27 to deliver effective child care at scale
09:31 outside of family units.
09:33 How do we do that?
09:36 First of all, I think one of the main areas
09:39 is this whole black hole of child care.
09:43 What are the different childhood inputs
09:45 that will produce effective adults?
09:48 Identifying those inputs and isolating them,
09:52 understanding their relation to producing adults,
09:57 and from that knowledge, designing interventions
10:02 that will ensure that they are effectively delivered,
10:05 and then setting up or building capacity
10:08 to ensure that these solutions that are designed
10:11 can be delivered at scale.
10:13 At the age of 19, we founded an organization,
10:22 or rather our first organization,
10:24 gave me an opportunity to work with,
10:28 or got exposed to 10,000 children
10:32 living across children's homes
10:34 in 23 different cities in the country.
10:37 These were children that came in
10:39 from various challenging traumatic scenarios.
10:44 There were children that went missing,
10:46 there were children that were abandoned by families,
10:48 there were children that were rescued by trafficking.
10:50 Basically, there was one common banner
10:52 that remained the same across all of these children,
10:55 which is they did not belong to any effective family.
10:59 And it was this exposure that a few of us got
11:04 at a very young age that kind of shook our,
11:07 and in a lot of ways, burst our bubble,
11:10 'cause we happened to be born into a great family,
11:11 so we didn't think there were children that didn't have.
11:14 So what startled us about the way these,
11:19 the orphanages or children's homes worked
11:21 was that the quality of childcare
11:23 that was delivered in these homes was so poor
11:28 that it was a safe assumption to make
11:30 that these two-crore children had little chance
11:33 of getting out of their poverty cycle
11:36 and becoming positive adults.
11:38 However, if we need to get this right,
11:43 what, after a decade of working in this space,
11:45 what we were convinced of was that
11:49 these very own children's homes or orphanages
11:52 was actually the bedrock of childcare within a society.
11:56 For a child that is not born into an effective family,
11:59 the state says, "Hey, come over.
12:01 "We have orphanages, we have children's homes
12:04 "where we will provide as effective
12:06 "as the childhood inputs that you would get in a family
12:08 "so that you could also become a positive adult."
12:12 That's why children's homes are so, so crucial
12:15 for us to work with.
12:18 Me and my team in Guardians of Dreams
12:20 is actually working to fix this.
12:22 What we're doing is we look to transform
12:26 the quality and effectiveness
12:27 with which these children's homes across the country
12:30 are able to deliver childcare.
12:32 And we're doing that by, again,
12:35 we're trying to keep a laser-sharp focus
12:38 on figuring out what are the various childhood inputs,
12:43 filling those knowledge gaps,
12:46 designing interventions based on that knowledge,
12:50 and then building implementation capacity.
12:53 What we're doing in Guardians of Dreams
12:55 is taking a 360-degree approach
12:58 to working with children's homes,
13:00 enabling them in various aspects, right,
13:02 from improving the environment of the homes
13:06 to improving the kind of nutrition
13:07 that the children are getting
13:08 to looking at improving the quality of education
13:11 to also looking at how are the children
13:13 able to access their rights
13:15 to eventually looking at who are the caregivers
13:18 that are working with the children in these homes.
13:20 And with my team in Guardians of Dreams,
13:24 what we're looking to do is to build and craft
13:28 a better future for our children,
13:29 to build a society where we can guarantee
13:33 that every child gets their required care
13:38 and support to grow into positive, productive,
13:45 stable adults who will then become the future of our nation.
13:50 Thank you.
13:53 (audience applauding)
13:56 (upbeat music)
13:59 (upbeat music)
14:01 (upbeat music)
14:04 (upbeat music)
14:06 (upbeat music)