Grad Students + Kara Weaves

At the office: Indu giving a small talk about the Kara Weaves story and process to the students and faculty

Last week, we were really happy to host a group of students from DePaul University Chicago and Kerala led by their faculty Prof Ramya Ramanath and Prof Vinay Raj respectively. The students were a mix of MBA and the Non-Profit Administration graduate program by both the schools.

We were happy to hear that what we had to share was of interest to both the groups of students since we are a business in the progress of registering ourselves as a non-profit organization. We prepared a little slideshow  presentation (shown below) explaining our working process and how we engage with local and international communities.

We were also fortunate enough to be joined by Anup Nair and Tony Jose, the co-founders of Local Economic Development Society (LEDS), a visionary group providing local-to-local networking for micro-enterprises across Kerala.

Anup Nair gives an engaging talk about his work

A north-south collaboration: Khamir + Kara Weaves

Design of our invite for the show together with Khamir

In 2008, a year after our collaboration with the Banyan, we got in touch with Khamir, a non-government organization from the northern state of Gujarat. Through a chance re-connection with some of her earlier collaborators while in Ahmedabad (the wonderful Sushma Iyengar), Indu heard of the wonderful work of the Khamir resouce center as a way to revitalize Kachchh's creative industries. She contacted the director Meera Goradia and learnt that they was seeking to do a sale & exhibition of their work in Bangalore with a collaborator. Upon hearing what we do, Meera asked if we would be interested: and of course we said yes!

The Banyan + meeting the President of India

left-right: Revathy, Sreedevi, Vandana of the Banyan, Surya and Indu

We love to meet people who share our world views and what we love even more is the opportunity to get to work with them. In this post I wanted to briefly cover an endearing collaboration we did in 2007 with the Banyan via our co-founder Revathy. At the opening ceremony, we also got to meet the (ex-)President of the nation, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam! From collaborations to meeting inspiring leaders: how did this all come about?