In response to Incentivizing Students to Attend School

          Pardada Pardadi's model and mission is inspiring and forward thinking.  The model targets girls in one of the most destitute and crime ridden areas.  This is also a consideration and a great way to see the impact that schools and education has on impacting a small community.  Hopefully Pardada Pardidi will gain visibility and garner support so similar models can be applied at a larger scale.
         Identifying with the cohort you are helping is extremely helpful in the process of poverty alleviation.  The fact that many girls in India have opportunity loss in sectors such as education and jobs shows the necessity of the Millenium Development Goals that specifically target these barriers. Increasing gender empowerment and education go hand-in-hand and the development of one is highly connected to the other.
    I became involved in educational reform when I was the president of my Habitat for

Humanity club, getting my first experience seeing the inequities inherent in systems and the work

being done to improve these circumstances. I always enjoyed tutoring students, as I believed

education was integral to development. I found work with Americorps advising students in

college readiness and access. I became a tutor then a director with the BUILD program through

the Cal Corps public service program learning about and expanding my passion for working with

education inequities and here I discovered my mission to work on bringing universal access to

education. This aligned perfectly with what the GPP minor offered me at CAL. 

       Pardada Pardadi appeals to me for a practice experience because it focuses on poverty alleviation through education and gender empowerment of the communities they work in. This is the type of development practitioner I want to be. I believe their values are in very close alignment with the values we have learned through the GPP minor. Their effort to develop education infrastructure and focus on

systemic reform is incredibly exciting.