
Community >> Jahnavi Jayanth
Jahnavi Jayanth
Company: Minerva Schools
Title: Student
Country: India
Sector: Education
Age: 18
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Communities being unable to challenge indoctrinated historical biases that fragment their social fabric, negatively affecting their culture’s mental health, has always remained Jahnavi’s focus. She believes this results in the misconception that social issues are the problems of only the parts of society facing them, that then leads to a vacuum in the adequate addressal of these issues.
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Until she turned twelve, she spent her time on mobilization campaigns amongst the students, parents, and staff of her school to change pedagogy and policy. She then dropped out of school and became the youngest champion of the Ashoka Fellow selection process in the history of the mammoth organization that built the sector of social entrepreneurship across 85+ countries. This time, while she challenged 35-year-old hiring policies and operational processes, she learned the crucial role, a viscerally and intellectually striking narrative plays, in making mobilization efforts sustainable. Recently, she began encountering subtle, yet powerful and detrimental social tensions arising from ethnic and racial differences in her global community of students from over 60 different countries. As a result, today, she is working on mobilizing the community to have confrontational, yet empathetic conversations on its dynamics in curated safe spaces. She is carving ways for this momentum to sustain itself through diverse stakeholders building the narrative together. Recognizing traces of these tensions in global relations, she is poised to extrapolating this mobilization work in international relations channels in the future.
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