Swara asked me that - few 19-20 year olds are interested in doing an internship. Do we do it? I jumped up and said Let’s Do It! Not knowing what I was signing up for, would open up such a learning space for me. These 17 business and law students joined us. We introduced ourselves as a bunch of volunteers and introduced the principles with which we would work.

Six of us joined in this process as ‘buddies’ and started designing the programme. After few iterations around the design we nailed it down to – ‘values’ that we would work through this one month. We came down to 12 values out of which we had to come down to 7-8 values that we could work through. While we would serve the journey of the interns we were keen to be a part of this journey ourselves. Great texts and conversations formed the basis of the design. We were going in circles in terms of understanding the fundamentals of some of the values – why, what, personal practices etc. That’s when our mentors stepped in. We had a beautiful circle with Arun dada and Meera ba. There was much more clarity that emerged. With ba and dada what I learnt was how to have a basic structure in design but have enough space and scope for emergence. It is extra ordinary with these mentors.

We agreed to a general design where we would work on a particular value for three days, have fourth day for consolidation, circles, reflections and open time. The first two values we decided to work on were – Kindness and Shram (labour of love).

The intention was for each value we have mentors anchoring these values. In this amazing mix of buddies and interns we also got Arundada and Meeraba to anchor the first value – Kindness and Generosity. Mansukhbhai to anchor the value of Shram (labour of love) in Vinoba Ashram.