When we first approached Forbes Marshall in 2020 to support our very first learning centre with the Bharwad community at Sonkhamb, the world was right in the middle of the COVID wave. Almost everything felt unsettled.
A serious slowdown seemed very real—especially for a tiny, two-year-old organisation like ours.Anjali Gokhale,who was then leading the Forbes Marshall CSR team, asked me Ganesh Birajdar (He, Him) candidly, “Ganesh, it’s COVID time—will you be able to run the program, or should we wait a year?”
Anjali, Rati Forbes, and the Forbes Marshall Foundation team trusted us when I said, “I want to do it anyway.” What more, Anjali became our very first coach in developing our first logic model, being able to methodically plan our program, and rigorously follow on the outcomes.
When the first year showed promising outcomes at our initial centre, the FMF team encouraged us further and extended their support to start four more centres in the Bharwad community. That trust gave us three crucial years—from 2020 to 2023—to build our early Bharwad story and create a momentum from which we have never looked back.First Anjali,and later Joshi Bina and Niharika Nautiyal
supported us with a lot of love, care and professional skills and push in the entire journey. Deeply proud and grateful to have Forbes Marshall as such important co-owners of the Learning Companions journey.
(Caring mitra foundation)