School for Community Wellbeing
Wellbeing encompases of health, economic growth, social development, ecology, built environment etc. With all of these factors taken into consideration, how will the wellbeing of the community look like?
Our school works alongside communities to ask a simple question: What does it mean to live well, together?
Instead of treating wellbeing as a service delivered by systems, we approach it as something grown from the place, shaped by the ways people care for one another, care to sustain livelihoods, care to restore ecologies, care to imagine their futures. Hence, wellbeing of a place is not just a checklist of health, economy, culture, and environment; it is everyday weaving of all these threads strong enough to hold everyone, well together. Sometimes this means supporting women's collectives that double as places of care. Other times it means re-imagining public spaces so they invite gathering instead of exclusion. In all cases, the community itself holds the knowledge of what wellbeing should look like.
The school is not just a site of study, it is a practice of listening, understanding, questioning, and co-creating, with the community.
Take for instance, our work on Reproductive Health Cultures. We collaborate with different communities to understand the practices of care that accompany every phase of womanhood: menstruation, childbirth, postpartum healing, and menopause. These conversations reveal that wellbeing is not just medical; it is cultural, social, and ecological. From the herbs used for recovery to the songs sung during childbirth, each practice tells us how communities weave health and meaning together.
The key questions that guide this school are:
- 🔎How can we understand a place, treating it like a story to read, so we can study, observe, record, think about, investigate, critique, and improve a location?
- 🔎How can we design education to put the student at the centre, helping them understand, feel for others , and critically think about community wellbeing?
- 🔎How can working together across many different fields help us better understand place-based situations?
- 🔎How can we find ways to start and guide change to see, shape, and improve our usual ideas about "development"?
- 🔎How can "learning by doing," help us understand, build empathy, and encourage personal reflection?
Past courses
Past
Mapping Community Systems of Wellbeing
A Geo-spatial mapping of formal & informal systems of community health and wellbeing, annotated with stories of lived experiences that highlight the practices of negotiation & navigation
- Schools For Concentration: Community Wellbeing
- Micro-Context: Tribal Settlements
- Micro-Context: Agrarian Practices
- Learning Module: Workshop
- Trimester: 01
Past
Community Health Systems
Introduces the formal & informal health systems that exist in Kundapura and Bidar (as specific cases), and how people navigate across these systems to manage their health and wellbeing
- Schools For Concentration: Community Wellbeing
- Micro-Context: Asha Workers
- Micro-Context: Community Based Healthcare Practices
- +1 More Micro-Context
- Place: Kundapura
- Place: Yelahanka
- Learning Module: Primer
- Trimester: 01
Past
Invisible Labour - Visible Consequences: Understanding women’s collective, labour and participation in local governance systems
9 – 13 Mar 2026
This workshop focuses on learning about women’s role and labour in Sanjeevini Sanghas, Panchayats, Krishi Kendras, Grama Panchayat and other PRIs that have been crucial to the development and wellbeing of people and places.
- Schools For Concentration: Community Wellbeing
- Micro-Context: Agricultural Practices
- Micro-Context: Sanjeevini Sanghas
- +1 More Micro-Context
- Place: Kundapura
- Learning Module: Workshop
- Trimester: 03
Past
Panchayats & Participatory Futures: Local Self-Governance & Water in Aluru
8 – 11 Mar 2026
How does a Gram Panchayat - the fundamental unit of democratic self-governance, and closest to the people - plan, build, maintain and sustain infrastructures of and for its public?
- Schools For Concentration: Community Wellbeing
- Micro-Context: Tribal Settlements
- Learning Module: Make-a-thon
- Trimester: 03
Making to understand Panchayat
18 – 21 Dec 2025
How does a Gram Panchayat - the fundamental unit of democratic self-governance, and closest to the people - plan, build, maintain and sustain infrastructures of and for its public?
- Schools For Concentration: Community Wellbeing
- Micro-Context: Tribal Settlements
- Learning Module: Make-a-thon
Past
Local culinary practices, nutrition and wellbeing
11 – 16 Oct 2025
Cooking is more than taste, it is everyday knowledge of care, health, and sustenance shaped by place, culture, and community. In this travelling studio, we learn by tasting, listening, and moving through kitchens.
- Schools For Concentration: Community Wellbeing
- Micro-Context: Fishmarkets
- Micro-Context: Food Habits In Sa Cluster
- +1 More Micro-Context
- Place: Gangolli
- Place: Kundapura
- Learning Module: Travelling Studio
- Trimester: 02