Flourish is a for-impact initiative that aims to pave the way for a more inclusive and compassionate next generation through stories that feature important themes essential for the current generation of children. The initiative started with eight bilingual books focused on imparting language skills and value education to the children. The bilingual books are currently set to be implemented at several schools through institutional partnerships.
Flourish initiative strives to make the stories more inclusive and diverse. An in-house developed Inclusivity Index comes in handy for achieving this. Using the Inclusivity Index, the stories are ensured to represent diversity and are free of biases. Following the success of the bilingual books, Tales For Tweens was released. Tales for Tweens is an inclusive and progressive English storybook for young adults. The book is a compilation of the finest stories spread across themes such as Body Positivity, Gender Identity, Saving Money, Climate Change, and Mental Health.
You can now buy the book from Amazon India 🎉
Skills 🤹🏾
Tools 🎨
Responsibilities 🤓
My role as the Project Lead of Flourish required me to wear multiple hats. Following were my responsibilities at Flourish:
- Defined the strategic goals🎯 for the initiative.
- Oversaw the project and ensured that the goals were met at planned timelines.
- Ideated and developed technological tools📐 aligned to meet the strategic goals of the project.
- Designed the storybooks 🌈 by collaborating with volunteers and educators.
Accomplishments 🎉
- Flourish's parent initiative, Reading Genius - Bilingual Stories was one of the finalists in the prestigious ELTons Innovation Awards by British Council.
- 3 Flourish apps are expert-approved ✅ in the Google Play Store.
- Flourish was one of the 100 initiatives selected from across the world for the UNLEASH Plus 2021 Incubation Program 💯.
UNLEASH Plus is a global 6-month incubation program for entrepreneurs working on social or environmental challenges, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. - Tales For Tweens have been receiving raving reviews from both parents and experts. The book has also received several notable media mentions for its unique attempt to tackle the taboos through stories.
Learnings 💡
While Flourish initially started as an experimental project, it reached the stage to transform into an impactful social initiative. Developing the initiative from scratch provided me with immense learning. A few of the learnings are as follows:
- Explored various open-source frameworks🧩 to develop the website and reading apps📱 for the students.
- The initiative pushed me a lot to learn more about the nuances of gender & sexuality, dimensions of inclusivity, and social justice.
- Driving the initiative through volunteers always pushed me to best optimize the workflows to enable maximum efficiency🐝 and quality with limited resources.
- More importantly, Flourish provided me with a first-hand experience of building a high-impact social initiative from scratch. Working on Flourish and the learnings from the UNLEASH Plus program provided immense knowledge on the various aspects of building an organization such as designing a product for scale with a high-performing team, crafting an efficient go-to-market strategy, measuring the impact, and raising funds to sustain the initiative.
Please do get in touch if you're keen on developing bilingual language learning material for your community and looking for some assistance. I used Reading App Builder for developing the Flourish apps. More than happy to guide you through the process :)
