He is Omprakash
In 2004, he inspired us to believe that positive social change begins with simple human relationships.
Since 2004, we have been dedicated to building mutually beneficial & educational relationships between grassroots social impact organizations
—a.k.a. our Partners—
and volunteers, donors & classrooms around the world who can learn from & support their work.
At the core, our work is about learning through relationships, and our primary goal is fundamentally educational. By forging connections within our network, we aim to "lead out" citizens of the world towards an awareness of the human community from which they are indivisible and within which they can enact change.
Our Partner organizations use our platform to recruit volunteers and interns, raise funds, and connect with each other, while individuals use the platform to find international volunteer and internship opportunities, raise funds, and receive accredited online training and mentorship. Through our EdGE program, we help universities, schools, and nonprofits reimagine and reinvent their global social impact efforts in ways that disrupt paternalism and inequality and strive for more radical learning and social change.
This process helps our diverse international Partners amplify their impact, and it empowers everyone involved to become more critically conscious participants in processes of social transformation. Our bold vision is to reinvent 'global learning' to make it more affordable, more ethical, and more impactful.
The Empty Bowl
...represents the endless potential that emerges when we open ourselves to new questions, new ideas, and new relationships. For us, this openness is both a method and a product: rather than promote any single cure for the world's ills, we hold open a space that can amplify local voices and facilitate the sharing of multiple perspectives. We hope that the diverse members of our educational community will find humility through the recognition of their own interconnectedness, and that this humility will guide their actions as informed citizens of the world.
How Omprakash Works
There's a lot going on around here.
Global Dialogue: The Social Change Forum
Global Dialogue is a curated ‘South-facing’ space designed to foster reflection, collaboration, resource-sharing, and action planning between Omprakash Partners and other experts and activists from diverse social contexts around the world. Some threads are open for public viewing, and others are only accessible to Contributors. All Omprakash Partners are automatically granted Contributor status, and other visitors can request to become Contributors.
Useful for:
- Worldwide organizations
- Academics, researchers, development practitioners
- Committed volunteers and interns
EdGE is Education through Global Engagement
EdGE is an online learning platform designed to foster critical reflection and dialogue amongst people seeking to ‘do good’ when crossing differences of culture and power — whether under the banner of volunteering, interning, service-learning, gap years, or any other. EdGE supports students before, during, and after their field positions by providing mentorship, customizable curricula, logistical support, and more. EdGE students learn approaches to participatory research, and ultimately create and publish Capstone Projects which explore different perspectives on a given social issue. Anyone can join a public EdGE cohort, and we also offer custom cohorts for universities, schools, and other institutions seeking to deepen their students’ learning and dialogue.
Useful for:
- Ethically-minded volunteers, interns and researchers
- Universities and colleges
- Worldwide organizations
Network of Ethical Global Partnerships
The heart of Omprakash is our vast network of carefully vetted social impact organizations all over the world. These are our Partners. This website is built to be the most powerful space on the web dedicated to such organizations, largely in the 'Global South.' Our Partners are fully autonomous, maintaining dynamic profiles that allow them to professionally showcase their work, receive applications from prospective volunteers, collect donations and more. We invite all members of our network to connect with our Partners independently. We are adamantly against the middleman 'placement' model of global engagement.
Useful for:
- Worldwide organizations
- Prospective volunteers, interns & researchers
- Prospective donors
Grassroots Fundraising for Social Change
Partner organizations use the Omprakash platform to create fundraising campaigns and transparently document expenditures to build trust and dialogue with their donors. EdGE students can create their own crowdfunding campaigns to support Partners of their choice or to subsidize the costs of their EdGE-related international travel and living expenses. All donations made through Omprakash are tax-deductible for US-based donors.
Useful for:
- Our Partners
- EdGE volunteers and interns
- Prospective donors
The 'Much More Than a Blog' Blog
Our Blog is a constantly-expanding archive of observations and reflections from across our diverse network. Partner organizations and individual users can create rich multimedia posts to document their work and share their learning with others. EdGE students use the Blog throughout their field positions to build a ‘Record of Perspectives’ (ROP): a digital archive of different viewpoints about a given social issue, its root causes, and strategies for addressing it. At the conclusion of their field positions, EdGE students synthesize their ‘ROP’s’ into a Capstone Project which they publish on the Blog. Visitors can browse the Blog by author, subject, region, and more!
Useful for:
- Our Partners
- Volunteers and interns
- Academics, researchers and development practitioners
- Universities and colleges