School Visit: Sahara City Homes

Summary: We have demoed and launched in a school for underserved children operated by Sahara City Homes.

We are launching in a school started as part of Corporate Social Responsibility of the housing department at Sahara City Homes. The conversation started in late December, and Rahul has contacted them every week for the past two months, to no avail. They finally returned his call last week, and we’ve since met with the folks and run a demo.

This school started last March, and is divided into two sections: a more advanced, “upper” level class, and a younger, “lower” level class. Sahara purchased the TV and DVD player on their own, and are using DSH to augment the quality of education they can provide to their children. (In all, they operate 16 schools for slum children around Lucknow; this is a pilot.)

The first visit (Saturday) was very embarrassing, as the DVD player was a local Indian model and wasn’t compatible with our DVDs. Video would run, but most chapters had no audio (yet a few did). We didn’t think to bring a DVD player with us, so we spent most of the class (a) trying to get the darn thing to work and (b) using a vocabulary lesson that made little sense in absence of the story. We agreed to come back today.

And come back we did, in full force with a full convoy of DSH employees. Eight of us in total (everyone in the office, minus Urvashi, Priyanka, and Roshan). We were determined to have a good demo and figure out what happened, and to generally see how things work. I’m happy to announce that we have now launched in Sahara City Homes. This demo consisted of Rahul running the class and demonstrating how to mediate using the DVDs. The next time we go back, we’ll coach the teacher through using the DVD.