Young Australian of the Year Working for India

Jennifer Star (nee Purcell) has recently been named the NSW Young Australian of the Year for her efforts in creating and running an international NGO, called Tara.Ed (www.taraed.org) at the age of 20. Now in its fifth year, Tara.Ed reaches out to over 1500 underprivileged children in rural and remote areas of India. By focusing on teachers rather than students, Tara.Ed aims to promote sustainability in education by building star teachers to help students shine.

Tara.Ed revolutionises the concept of charity in that Tara.Ed is a partners rather than donor. The Tara.Ed program is built around the “Teacher Tour” – in which teacher education students from Australian universities do a teaching internship in one of the Tara.Ed partner schools in rural Maharashtra.

The concept of Tara.Ed started when Jennifer went to India as a volunteer for an NGO called World Vision in 2004, when she was 17 years old – and this is when she fell in love with the Indian Sub-Continent. When she was 20 years old, Jennifer returned to India on her own, to live and work in a slum in Jaipur. At the time, she was young, enthusiastic and thought she was invincible and perfectly capable of saving the world! The reality was completely different – the slum was boarded by a national highway and open sewerage channel and three days into her stay, the channel overflowed and raw sewerage flooded her room. On her first day at school Jennifer was thrown in front of a class of 48 children – outside, under a tree with no resources, not even a blackboard – and told to “Teach!” Coming from a quiet, little country town in Australia, it was a big change. Jennifer explains that she cried for the first week! “But I acknowledged that I was lucky, as for myself the situation was temporary – and for the people I was living and working with, it is for their whole life. “

The idea of Tara.Ed started when Jennifer was living in Jaipur. Not only was she sharing her knowledge about teaching, she discovered that she was also learning. She was faced with a decision – She could either go back to India each year and teach 30 children and change 30 lives. Or she could go to India and teach 30 teachers, each of whom would then teach 30 children and change 900 lives…

“Australian students have four years of education theory stuffed into their heads, but are not so good on the practical. The Indian teachers have 5 or sometimes even 10 years of practical experience, but may never had the opportunity of a university education, so it’s a cross cultural skills exchange in which both Australian and Indian schools, teachers and children benefit. We are currently working with 5 schools, 74 teachers, and 1817 children. Our aim is to reach 20000 children by the year 2020”, says Jennifer.

Tara.Ed also builds bridges of tolerance and understanding at a grassroots level between two countries that have a lot in common, but have recently been caught up in negativity, slurs of racism and media frenzy. Tara.Ed is not just connecting teachers across this divide, but also classrooms; engaging Indian and Australian school children – who will be the leaders of tomorrow – and building tolerance and understanding despite cultural differences.

If you would like to get involved and help with the work that Tara.Ed is doing in Australia and India, visit their website (www.taraed.org) and help make a difference.

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