Epistle
Dear Universe,
Tonight I found myself gazing out the window and reflecting on something I never thought I would be able to learn from a laptop. Several months ago I joined Pehchaan The Street School as an online Content Writer and, to be perfectly honest, I never imagined where or how I would fit in.
Not in a classroom.
Not at the school.
Not with the kids or the volunteers.
I was in an entirely different environment, surrounded by the glow of my computer screen, opening up new documents and filling them with words that somehow brought me closer to my goal of contributing to something bigger than myself. But, you see, in the beginning, the only problem was that I wasn’t sure if that was actually happening.
There is this strange disconnect that comes with working from a distance, where you don’t always get to see the fruits of your labor! You finish a beautiful article, a thoughtful post, an eloquent LinkedIn update, or a Quora response and you know you’ve done something worthwhile, but you have no one there to acknowledge it besides yourself.
And so I continued writing, filling up Word documents with articles, creating posts and sharing them far and wide. I wrote about students, events, volunteers, visitors, donations, and the array of beautiful people that have come together to make Pehchaan what it is today.
I did it all, in fact, until one day I realized I hadn’t been doing it for the wrong reasons.
While initially I thought of content writing as just another task to cross off my list, gradually I came to understand it as something much greater! An opportunity to highlight the often unseen efforts of people and make them known. Because a single donation, no matter how seemingly small, can add up to make a huge difference,
and
Volunteers giving their time and energy to make a change, even when it’s not reciprocated in kind,
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An entire organization striving to improve education systems and break down barriers without being in a classroom can all be amplified through a single well-placed story.
And that, dear Universe, is when it all clicked for me.
I started to see the value in not just any content, but in content that made a difference, that brought people together and, more importantly, made their impact impossible to ignore.
There have been times when I questioned my writing skills, stared for hours at a single sentence wondering if it could be phrased any better, worried that my work wasn’t up to standard and that I didn’t deserve to be a part of such a wonderful initiative. But gradually, those questions morphed into something else entirely, namely, “Can this be useful?”
And, contrary to what you might expect,
I actually found that working on “Can this be useful?” made me less hesitant and self-conscious about my writing!
I joined Pehchaan The Street School because I wanted to gain experience, to learn, and to contribute to something bigger than myself while balancing it out with my college life, but what I didn’t expect was for it to change my outlook on volunteering, writing, and indeed, education itself.
Because
What if someone isn’t able to be a part of an initiative in person?
What if they can’t come out and teach a class or volunteer at a school?
Does that mean their impact can never be seen?
I don’t think so.
Because, perhaps, the seeds of change are sown in strange places and in strange ways, through articles, through interviews, through research and through reflection. And maybe, just maybe, change always begins with a person willing to sit down, open a document, and wonder if it can really make a difference.
Which, I suppose, is where this post began!
Know about us:
Website: https://pehchaanstreetschool .org
Google: Pehchaan The Street School
Indraprastha Metro Station, Delhi 110001
097117 18972
Review here > https://g.co/kgs/X4x1GL
Facebook page link — https://www.facebook.com /PehchaanTheStreetSchoolOfficial/
Facebook Pehchaan Group link — https://lnkd.in/gyGXxbtu /162142001383888/?ref=share
