The idea to start an NGO in India came to Jennifer Star while she was living in a slum in Jaipur for three months, at just 20 years old.
“I was walking across a bridge that spanned the sewerage channel and there was a little girl wading through the raw sewerage picking out rags and recyclables to sell,” said Jennifer, who grew up in Bowral, a country town in NSW.
“I just stopped because I realised she was in my class, she was eight years old, and I thought ‘So this is what she does when she doesn’t come to school – and if she doesn’t have an education, then she’s not going to learn any skills to do anything else.’
Now six years later Jennifer is President of Tara.Ed, an NGO that goes out to rural schools across India and gives teachers education training and resources.
Of course, it took a lot to turn one bright idea on a bridge into a successful NGO that has gone on to help 16 schools, 150 teachers and 5000 children.
Jennifer said the hardest thing at the start of her journey was getting people to take her idea seriously.
“When I was 20 years old, without an education background, saying ‘I’ve got an idea’, nobody wanted to listen to me, everybody said ‘No’.”
“It was only when I found one person who worked for Microsoft who really believed in what I said. He became my mentor and guided me through the business world.”
Tara.Ed officially became an NGO in 2008 and sent the very first group of Australian teachers to India to run a training program in 2009.
It wasn’t long before Jennifer’s dream of changing the future for poor children started coming true.
She recalls one young student who was too embarrassed to show her his home “because the house didn’t have any electricity – it was just a single room mud hut.”
After struggling to keep the boy from leaving high school to start working and earning money, he has now graduated and is studying engineering at university.
“He’ll be the first person in his village to have a university degree,” Jennifer said.
“That’s one story and we’ve worked with 5000 kids. If I ever think I don’t want to do something for Tara.Ed I just think of that and think, ‘ok its worth it‘.”
Jennifer said the next step for the NGO was scaling up its operations.
“The best thing about the Tara.Ed model is it’s really scaleable, in that it can be used in India it can be used in Bangladesh it can be used anywhere. Our next challenge is to go from a little NGO to a really big scale model,” she said.
And her advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
“If somebody says no, there’s another way. And find a mentor, someone that you trust that can just be a sounding board.”
Tara.Ed’s teacher training programs are run by volunteers who are final year education students from Australian universities. If you’re an education student and would like to work with Tara.Ed you can visit the website here.
Donations are also accepted via the website.
