SUMMER INTERNS /VOLUNTEERS AT SPARC, SEPTEMBER 2012

Through the years at any given time we have many interns and volunteers who come to work with us. This summer we had three interns – two from the USA and one from France. We had two volunteers as well for a short period of time.

Ariane Cohin worked on the incremental housing report, and did some diagrams of the evolution of the construction (sections and plans) for every household. She did some 3D models of these houses on Sketch-up as well.

Ginny Fahs worked on two major projects: launching the SPARC Citywatch Blog and doing background research on the possibility of instituting a private donations platform through the SPARC website.

One of the volunteers, Nova, helped in creating state and city databases regarding urban re- forms, local NGO and CBO networks, summarized reports on consultations at Kerala, updated housing and sanitation tables for the Annual Report and prepared the DSR for Pune and Ahmed- nagar in Excel. Lastly, also created a reference for charts in Excel and what they are used for. While Jayesh helped in doing some proof reading of the reports.

Learnings from SPARC:

We asked the interns and volunteers what they have taken from the SPARC experience. Some of the feedback that we got was:

• Better idea on incremental housing process & challenges they face while upgrading their houses
• How difficult it is to implement any broad strategy in slums because of the huge variety of problems that require a different approach and solutions
• Learnt about Indian politics & policies & current events surrounding urban poverty and slums
• What effective community organization looks like, methods of mobilizing & catalyzing activity on the ground