Auroville’s Next Steps:
Guiding Youth, One Step At A Time
During AVI USA’s visit to Auroville in October 2024, our Director of Development, Binah Thillairajah, met with Ayesha Kapur, an Aurovilian who was born in Auroville and is a recent graduate of Columbia University. Ayesha returned to Auroville to apply her international experiences for the benefit of the community.
Ayesha is passionate about supporting Auroville’s youth and had already begun working with high school students as an informal adviser. Following her conversation with Binah, Ayesha officially founded ‘Next Steps,’ a youth counseling and advisory group that serves Auroville schools.
Read below to learn more about Ayesha, ‘Next Steps,’ and their vision for the future.
AVI USA: What is Next Steps, and when did it start? What projects does it work with?
Ayesha/Next Steps: Next Steps began in end of October as an official activity. Before that, the work had already started, as I was already meeting and advising Auroville high school students about their future plans before the official start of Next Steps.
So far, Next Steps includes college counseling services for Auroville high schools, internship placements, and helping the schools to fundraise. In the future, we want to help youth in a more broad sense, such as with entrepreneurship, financial support for education, empowering sports and physical education, in whichever way we can.
AVI USA: Who is Next Steps – leader/group/or different roles and how did everyone become involved in it.
Next Steps executives are Sasikanth Somu and Milan Kapur. Ayesha Kapur helps to manage the activity. Shabbar Ali helps with accounts and managing the project. Fanny and others are also involved in decision making. Ayesha began the activity and then organically those who were involved in the schools began to help and become part of the team, such as Shabbar, Sasikanth and Fanny.
AVI USA: How did the idea for Next Steps come about, and has Next Steps embodied this original idea or is it different?
The idea for Next Steps was about empowering youth and uplifting the community, giving more opportunities and reasons for young people to move or return to Auroville after their studies. We keep this idea in mind whenever making decisions about our projects.
4. How does Next Steps want to evolve in the future?
We want to start giving scholarships and financial support to youth. We also want to expand the team to serve more Auroville youth and create opportunities and connections for their life after highschool.
AVI USA: What is the most surprising thing about how Next Steps has evolved since the beginning?
We were not surprised but grateful for how receptive people in the community were to our efforts and accepting our support.
We could actually support the students with college applications simply by listening and doing research, even though we are not trained as college counsellors. However students have expressed that our efforts were able to help them, and this was a pleasant surprise. We were also happy that we could help some of the Auroville schools with getting registered on AVI usa and setting up a newsletter for their fundraising.
AVI USA: What is your most meaningful accomplishment to date?
When a student expressed that our efforts helped them get into their dream college, this felt like a very meaningful accomplishment. Even if we can touch one person’s life in a direct way like this, we feel happy. Asides from that, being able to help the schools with fundraising felt like a big accomplishment.
AVI USA: What’s “next” for Next Step?
We want to find ways to support Auroville youth financially, with the donations that we receive. We need to see what is feasible, but we have ideas such as helping them to start their own initiatives (small activities or units), helping finance education like short courses, helping support them while they receive vocational training/internship experience, supporting physical education/local sports teams that are youth driven, etc. We also want to expand our administration and create a solid foundation for our team.
