Trust for Youth and Child Leadership (TYCL) aims to bring positive change in youth, children, and their community through safe, inclusive, participative, and innovative leadership models. TYCL creates safe and engaging spaces for young people and their allies to develop their whole selves (emotional, mental, spiritual, social, and physical). During my internship at TYCL, I worked on two research projects: 1) a youth-led mobile mental health clinic: that addresses access and affordability gaps in mental health services in India; and 2) social work in emerging technologies: inclusive innovation hopes and obstacles for social work practice in India. Additionally, I worked on the mobile mental health clinic program implementation, monitoring and evaluation and resource mobilization for TYCL’s programs.

I spent the first month of my internship in Puducherry, India and the remaining in New York City. My first responsibility was to understand all the programs happening at TYCL in India and put together three pitch decks, budgets for each program, and project proposals to reach out to potential donors. All the projects were aligned with TYCL’s mission. I was able to successfully fundraise and participate in the Inclusive Summer Camp, submit three major grant proposals, and connect with two potential high networth individuals. Then, I focused on an end-to-end program evaluation for the mobile mental health clinic that was piloted in 2020, along with a team of five other members. I had the opportunity to go door-to-door during the community outreach and sensitize community members about TYCL’s youth helpline and mental health services, attend calls on the helpline and provide counseling to community members, conduct focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews, write a research paper, and analyze the data collected using Nvivo. Our team successfully submitted an abstract to the Global Conference on Children and Youth. The results of the evaluation of the pilot will help the team while further planning the program. Lastly, I had the opportunity to attend events at the United Nations during the High Level Political Forum in New York City. I was able to leverage my macro social work skills of fundraising, research, program evaluation, and micro social work skills of active listening, clinical skills, and community engagement throughout the internship.

During my first month of my internship in Puducherry, language was a significant barrier as I worked in the rural communities where the community members only spoke in Tamil. I speak Hindi, English, Marathi and Gujarati, and this was the first time I was living in another part of the country (Puducherry in South India) where the local language is Tamil. Some of the members on the local team in India also spoke predominantly in Tamil. However, the team was extremely supportive and inclusive, and the two members who spoke fluently in English always helped me communicate with the local community members, and over the course of the month I learned basic Tamil. Another challenge I faced was during fundraising for the programs. May and June is summer in India and most people take their holidays during this time as their children are also off from school. Hence, I would not receive responses from potential donors and corporate social responsibility (CSR) teams in a timely manner to set up any meetings to take the conversation forward. I was unsuccessful with CSR funding but managed to successfully raise funds from two individual donors. However, my supervisor, Dr. Siva was extremely supportive throughout the summer and helped me grow from these challenges.

My goal is to become a transnational social worker and scholar. This internship gave me the opportunity to do research and work towards publishing two research papers over the course of the year, which will help me as I apply for PhD programs in the near future. TYCL has also given me the chance to work in different community-based mental health settings in India and the US. This helped me work towards my goal of developing a transnational understanding of how to make mental health services more accessible through research and evaluation models. The research projects helped enhance my knowledge and understanding around tech social work through inclusive innovations and the challenges and hopes for the future in the Indian and global context. I also learned qualitative coding, writing perspective research papers, conducting an end-to-end program evaluation with a team of researchers, collaborative teamwork, and evidence-based practices in social work. These skills will help me throughout my career as a social worker.