Challenge     It all started with the health issues of the students in our college. As the cafeteria food was not  healthy/tasty enough, the students used to skip meals or eat junk food more often.   We all knew the problem was with the food preparation and eradicating the problem is the only  solution. Provide the fresh vegetables and things will improve but, implementing this, down the  line, more than 1000+ lives were impacted emotionally, mentally and economically.     Selection    Storytelling is one tool, which helps you to connect with people from different backgrounds  easily and effectively, but integrating this tool with visualization can do wonders. We interacted  with students to know more about the issue and told the students stories to the cafeteria people  to them to coordinate and improve the overall condition. Cafeteria helped us with more  information and major concern was the good quality vegetable v/s the vegetable price. We had  to find a way to buy good quality vegetables at relatively lower cost. We did the groundwork and  connected with the local farmers. We helped them visualize the benefits that they can reave  from this partnership. The storytelling plays an important role here, as the farmers do not trust  anyone easily. We told them stories of other families that got positively impacted because of  similar initiatives in order to gain trust.    Application    Normally, farmers sell their vegetables to a middle men (broker) which further sell them to final  buyers. The model proposed focus on eliminating the middleman and directly linking the  producer and the consumer. Small set of farmers were identified and on on-demand basis the  vegetables were being transferred to the college cafeteria. In order to maintain a long term  relationship with the farmers, we had counselling sessions with them, in which we asked them  about day to day struggles / difficulties. At the beginning, they were reluctant to share their side  of the story until we helped them visualize, the problem of the students they are helping to deal  with, stories about similar families that we had positively impacted earlier. It really helped  gaining their confidence by providing them their comfort zone. We discovered that how apart  from financial crisis, they experience from emotional and mental crisis as well. Due to hard  financial conditions, they didn’t have electricity at their place, their children do not go to school  and mainly they were very much dependent on day to day earnings. We started thinking to  resolve their issues for the overall productivity thus impacting bigger audience.

Insight & Approach     As mentioned, apart from students' health, there are multiple parties involved now to be taken  care of. Starting from students health, cafeteria expenses, farmers trust, farmers family  condition and the transportation. We started with elimination of the middle, which benefited both  the producer as well as consumer. Thus resulting in a win-win situation. The students health  improved over a period of a few weeks as now healthy food was being served at the cafeteria.  As a good gesture, college students agreed to teach farmers children, who were not able to  afford school. The transportation model was being introduced, which generated another set of  employment for Auto / rickshaws. This model was first tested in our college and then same  ideology was being passed on to nearby colleges as well. In parallel to this, we had a discussion  with the industrialised as well, to finance this project, to provide solar lamps to the farmers. This  indeed built a self sustaining business model for the farmers as well as the college cafeteria  which helped them in mental, emotional and economical way.   We started with improving college student health issues and unknowingly explored much  more bigger picture and impacted a lot of lives on the way.      It’s not just one approach, at times the approaches are a piece of the puzzle, a bigger picture.  One should always try to think out of the box and try different combinations as I have tried to do  in the above mentioned example. This is one of the projects which I did during college days.  Currently I am a Software Developer and seeking for a manager position now. This course has  really helped me providing an new insight / or perspective to look at the things. Really grateful to  have this.

