Yuvabe: Work – Serve - Evolve

For those unfamiliar with the tech world, a conversation about what Yuvabe does can feel like a sudden immersion in a foreign language: AI, ML, Fullstack, market research, desk research, business solutions, open source ERP software, dashboards. But the larger picture is overwhelmingly human: virtuous cycles of symbiotic growth, with the community investing in youth and these youth becoming invested in sustaining their communities. “Our intention,” says Sriman, “is an organization which enables youth empowerment at a higher order scale.”

Work

Quilt.AI was itself only two years old when its two founders, one of whom had been Sriman’s neighbour in Singapore, essentially agreed to fund Yuvabe in exchange for Yuvabe serving - but only part-time - as its back office. “It was quite bold of them, being a start-up, to say we’re going to see how it goes,” says Sriman. He and Anupama identified a dozen local engineering students and recent graduates and put them on the job. The team began learning the skills they needed in real time as they worked for Quilt’s own clients. Anupama explains, “We started with the tech team first, doing all the data mining, insights, and then together with content and design teams we started putting together reports.”

A little over two years later, it is clear that the gamble has paid off, though it has taken, as Sriman states, “18 months of work in the trenches. The first year we used to sit and read books. We worked on grammar, writing and phrases. They’ve come a long way.”

Anupama elaborates, “Initially there were times when they could not be put on a call to talk to the client. From that to the Quilt founders now directly pinging them for work is an amazing transformation. The team has many youth from the bioregion, and they didn’t have spoken English or the confidence to speak. So it’s tremendous. Now, unless I’m asked to help, I don’t step in. They’re just by themselves doing their own thing directly with the client.”

Sriman continues, “Quilt has a few software products now, and the backbone of that is because of the work that was done in Auroville. The technology that was built, the whole infrastructure in terms of the pipelines which allow data management and AI processing, has all been done with Anupama and the youth team.”

“Today Quilt also has clients all over the world, and we do solid work to support them. For example, the content team puts together reports for the Gates Foundation. One of the projects was to understand the perception of their brand in India. So kids from Edyanchavady sat and put together this super polished report, 50 slides, using digital data accessed through the tech team. This went to the Gates Foundation leadership in India and in Seattle. Quilt does a lot of work with UN Women, with the Satyarthi Foundation, and other foundations. The team in Singapore is more qualitative researchers, but our team puts the reports together, about 250 over the last year.”

Serve

But this work is restricted entirely to weekday afternoons. Every weekday morning, the entire Yuvabe team works only for the community. Some teach at Auroville Outreach Schools. Others have helped Anupama develop and run a hands-on STEAM (STEM plus Arts) programme at Deepanam School, which has proven highly successful and may soon be scaled more widely. Still others have worked on design and tech projects for Auroville service units. Sriman reels off the list. “Currently we work with Solitude Farm. We work through Flourish to support other Auroville units. We have done work for Hemp Planet and helped Pitanga, Solar Kitchen, BCC.” They’ve just created a small tool for the Auroville Bakery which they’re hoping the bakery will start using. The idea is to encourage units to make use of better business solutions using open source software.

Sriman goes on to explain how the community angle is essential to Yuvabe at multiple levels. He notes that Yuvabe’s monthly city service contribution is always among the ten or twelve highest. “So although we are set up as an income generating unit, we run it as a not-for-profit because every month we pay out what we get, and we basically have nothing in the bank. We’re just doing this to get as many young people as possible in here driving it.”

And drive it, they do. Anupama mentions how meaningful and fun the community work is for the youth. “Some of those who teach have gone through these schools. They have studied at Transition, Deepanam, Udavi, and then they ask to go back to their school and do these projects. After last year’s STEAM Fest (an event open to the community), a lot of new youth joined the team, saying, ‘Oh, we didn’t know this was going on in Yuvabe’, and because they see doing community work as fun.” “Anupama makes it fun,” says Sriman, “because she does amazing experiments.”

Evolve

Saturday is reserved for self-development initiatives and looking at ways the team can help each other build their own capacities. Sriman offers some examples. “We’ve done a workshop on social and emotional learning with Mattram. Recently, we did a play completely driven by the team doing the Quilt work. Twelve of them came together with guidance from Rashmi at Mattram. They scripted it, and they presented four little stories in a 40 minute play. All of them went through a process of emotional expression that was phenomenal. And the idea now is to take it to the villages.”

But Yuvabe’s weekday ethos is just as focused on individual, team, and community evolution and growth as the Saturday programming. Sriman and Anupama’s palpable energy and contagious enthusiasm play no small role in making it so. “The work a Svaram or a Pitanga does is so interesting, just learning about it is fun, and then to see how we can customise software to handle their needs is also super fun,” says Anupama. Each new assignment is welcomed as a learning challenge. “Svaram is a fairly decent sized unit, and to put an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system there is not straightforward. So the team, completely new, has done it from scratch, figured out the software, figured out the engagement, figured out the listening skills, all of it,” says Sriman.

Anupama highlights another aspect of the team’s learning. She says, “I think this exposure with outside clients, and the combination of that and the work we do with Auroville is a very good balance. Otherwise everyone’s stuck in their own bubble inside Auroville. So there are deadlines, there is a work ethic. You stick to a schedule, you plan, you deliver. The youth actually learn how to do things here.”

Yuvabe now has around 40 mostly local staff. Around 30% are Aurovilian and 35% are women.

At any given time, they are working on ten to twelve projects across four or five sectors. There is also a growing team of experienced mentors who can guide different aspects of Yuvabe’s work, including technology, design, business, and, more recently, climate science, impact, and sustainability. Sriman notes, “We’ve started generally to get work from Auroville (Svaram is our first paying customer), and from a few organisations outside, but our effort is to see that we can support more youth in other areas and make sure that the way of sustaining it can be independently managed, not just from one source.”

Over the longer term, ‘evolve’ means examining the ways Yuvabe can support Auroville sustainability. Sriman explains that they have formed a specialised team and will use impact analysis as a tool to come up with blueprints for what a sustainable community could mean. They’ve begun by speaking to units like Eco-Service (waste), Kinisi (mobility), and Eco Femme (circular economy) and will next look at farming and water. Yuvabe is also piloting a one-month intensive education programme they are calling the “School of Sustainability”, which will blend theory and practice in Auroville.

In hindsight

“We both came in fresh from the outside, and we did this pretty much figuring things out ourselves,” says Sriman. Both he and Anupama feel Auroville should offer some guidance to people who join and want to start a unit. “I would hold their hand,” adds Sriman, “and say, ‘You want to set up something, let me see how I can help’.” With all the skills available in the community, both find it unfortunate that there is not greater support available. “And nevertheless we still ran at high speed for two years and got to 40 people. We hire youth. We train within our constraints.”

The proposal they had submitted for Auroville to fund maintenance for 10 Aurovilian youth - who could be trained, focussing entirely on Auroville service unit projects, and who could then be placed directly with the service units - has not been approved. Sriman is still hopeful that Yuvabe will get the support required to enable youth specifically for community projects. Anupama clarifies, “We are still doing service work. But we are saying we could scale better.” Sriman sighs, “We would serve the community better. But we’re generally optimists.”