Deshpande Center Junior Fellowship now Open!

For anyone interested, please contact the lady below:

Are you looking for an opportunity to experience and contribute to the development sector in India?

Are you passionate, enthusiastic and flexible??

The Global Exchange Program Junior Fellowship may be the right opportunity for you!

The Deshpande Foundation has short term opportunities for individuals interested in gaining experience in exciting and growing organizations: The Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship (DCSE) and other nonprofits based in the Sandbox of Innovation (in Hubli, Karnataka). Opportunities available in cost/benefit analysis, teaching, documentation, monitoring and evaluation, curriculum design and more. Time frame between 5-6 months. These opportunities are unpaid, but a very modest stipend is provided in addition to housing. If this is something that interests you, please send an email with your resume and cover letter to gep@deshpandefoundation.org, outlining your skills and areas of interest along with the time period. Junior fellowships are available year round.

Allegra Harris

Associate, Deshpande Foundation

92 Montvale Ave, Suite 2500
Stoneham, MA 02180
Phone: (781)-481-9055 ext.36

TED starts its search for TEDIndia Fellows

TED is searching for 100 innovative world-changing world citizens to be a part of its TEDIndia Conference. Read more about the Fellows program here.

You all know that I was a TED2009 Fellow in Long Beach and how wonderful the experience was. So I encourage everyone to apply. If you'd rather nominate someone, please email their name and email address to fellows AT ted DOT com.

The TEDIndia Fellows program is a part of the larger TED Fellows Program, a new international fellowship program designed to nurture great ideas and help them spread around the world. This year, organizers will select 100 promising individuals from around the world to attend the very first TEDIndia Conference. At the end of the year, organizers will select 20 individuals from a pool of the TED, TEDGlobal, and TEDIndia Fellows to participate in an extended three-year Senior Fellowship, bringing them to six consecutive conferences. The principal goal of the program is to empower the Fellows to effectively communicate their work to the world.

Benefits of the Fellowship include conference admission, round-trip transportation, housing and all meals. Fellows will also participate in a two-day pre-conference with the opportunity to present a short talk for consideration for TED.com, elite skills-building courses taught by world experts, social opportunities and surprise extras.

The TEDIndia Fellows program will have international representation with a distinctly South Asian majority, with approximately 75% of the Fellows representing the South Asian region, and 25% representing other regions of the world. South Asia is defined as including the countries of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. For the global pool, applications will also be sought from the other five target regions: Africa, Asia/Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, with consideration to the applicants from other countries.

The program seeks remarkable thinkers and doers who have shown unusual accomplishment, exceptional courage, moral imagination and the potential to increase positive change in their respective fields. The program focuses on innovators in technology, entertainment, design, science, film, art, music, entrepreneurship and the NGO community, among other pursuits. Applicants are generally between 21-40 years of age, though anyone over 18 and over 40 may apply. They must also be fluent in English; though moderate fluency will be accepted on a case-by-case basis.

South Asian Flavor

For the next few months, this blog might take on a more south asian flavor. That's because my current project requires me to be steeped in finding the best of the unconventional best in the South Asian sphere and I'm combing around looking for these amazing folks.

Here's what I'm looking for:

• Between the ages of 21-40
• Doing something truly extraordinary for/within their community preferably in South Asia.
  
• A polymath
• Speaks decent English
  

If you have any recommendations, please let me know.

Thanks!

HI's Youth Exchange Program: Spend two weeks in France, all costs paid!

Want to spend two weeks in France, all expenses paid, with a group of fun people from around the world?? Read on...

A lot of people ask me how I started my crazy world traveling. The truth is that I grew up very sheltered like a lot of other people. I had very open-minded parents and that helped a lot. But they didn't know a lot about these types of things. The opportunities were things that I just jumped on, and lucked out with the rest of it.

One of the opportunities that started it all off was my youth hostelling experience at 22. I was a young, inexperienced traveler; all my life, I'd read and been very taken with British literature (I come from an ex-colonial country and it still has significant remnants of colonialism). So my sister and I went to England for a month, with our bookbags as our backpacks, newspaper articles as our guides, and a couple hundred dollars in our pockets. We stayed at youth hostels, particularly the ones run by Hostelling International (HI). They opened my world up. I met people from all over and exchanged stories. I got traveling tips, made friends, and became a travel addict. It all started there.

A year later, I got a wind of their wonderful exchange programs and did one to France. I'm still in touch with the people I met then. I've visited them, they've visited me. We're all family. It was wonderful, and just bolstered my travel itch.

Now I want you to have that experience too. HI's France exchange program just opened up. APPLY, APPLY, APPLY! Spend two weeks in France, ALL costs paid. Just FYI, you must be between 18-23 years of age. So spread the word...