Ayang Trust

Ayang Trust works in the domains of education and livelihood with a mission of fostering critically conscious, aware, and empowered communities that would lead to a socially just and thriving society. Currently, we are working with the marginalized and flood-affected tribal communities of the Majuli District in Assam. Majuli is a river island district on the river Brahmaputra in Assam, home to about 170,000 people. 80% of the people in this area belong to Schedule Communities and 75% of them are subsistence farmers completely dependent on their land. 

The Hummingbird School is the inspiration behind Ayang’s work. Since its establishment, the school has been designed as a model institution. In our other interventions in the public education systems, the school has so far been important. From across the island, the Northeast, and even the whole country, the school has been attracting people who are educators, social workers, etc. 

Students come, train with us, interact with the school’s operations, and take practices home to apply in their learning communities. As a result, our work helps many kids and teachers, in addition to the excellent quality of education at The Hummingbird School.

In the education vertical we focus on: Improving primary school education through teacher capacity building and enhanced community involvement, and; Supporting communities directly in establishing their community libraries to provide space where children find comfortable access to space and resources for their learning. 

The Ayang Trust’s Project FLIGHT (Fostering Learning and Inspiring Growth for Holistic Teaching) was designed to address the lack of the best environment for teacher professional development and support in Northeast India. The project is the result of long experience and useful learning learned from running The Hummingbird School and our studies into the most successful ways to support our teachers. 

For holistic and professional development, we started this project with 11 government schools from 3 school clusters inside Majuli district. 14 teachers were directly involved with this project. Teachers from Hummingbird Schools (5 teachers) are also a part of this project. Every Saturday excluding the second Saturday we organise Learning circles at the Training room of Ayang Trust where we stand as hand holdings for them. The Concepts of those sessions are already established in the context of The Hummingbird School. 

The SEED project is designed to support each Community Library for 2 years from the time of establishment. Over 2 years, Ayang supported each village in establishing its community library which would be owned and led by them. Ayang supports with an initial set of nearly 500 curated books for children and youth in Assamese, English, Hindi, and where possible relevant regional languages. 

Ayang also trains and provides handholding to the library facilitator, called “Xopun Sarothi” (dream charioteers) nominated by the community themselves for 18 months. By 2024, Ayang would facilitate the establishment of 200 Community Libraries in Assam (Majuli and surrounding districts). Presently Ayang is supporting 40 community libraries, of which, 20 libraries have been completed in around eight months and the next 20 have been started from February to March 2023.

Plans for next 1-3 years 

Over the next 1 year, the following are our goals for our work in education programs. We will strengthen and course correct based on learning from the past year. We will try to ensure proper functioning of 40 community libraries to create a proof of concept for community libraries at a scale that is established, owned, and run by communities for communities. We also plan to set up a teacher training and resource focus group housed within The Hummingbird School that would relay the learnings from The Hummingbird School to our partner schools and government LP Schools through direct and systemic interventions.

Educational: 

• Train and handhold 40 Community Library Educators and Library Management Committees to make the libraries functional and sustainable
• Document the learnings, and course corrections to have a replicable model design for community libraries
• Expand and set up a Support and Training Focus group with new team members and existing senior teachers of the school

• Mentor the teaching team at The Hummingbird School by providing support and feedback on teaching plans, assessment and documentation, and classroom environments
• Plan and conduct action research to inform both curriculum development as well as pedagogical recommendation
• Curate, contextualize and create teaching and learning materials aligned with the curriculum
• Create both short and long-term training plans basis the school curriculum and practices
• Deliver training and provide handholding support to partner school teachers

Organizational:

• Focus more on streamlining data and using technology-based solutions to automate many of the organization’s operational processes
• Have alternate Saturday team Learning circles at The Hummingbird School
• Have the whole team step back every month to drive harmony in the organizational culture

Capacity Building  

We want all our team members right from the field execution team to attend some kind of external training this year or attend exposure events. Looking forward to a variety of learning and exposure opportunities in community engagement, library work, FLN pedagogy, working with the government ecosystem, etc.