It’s been a tough week for the judges. We had more than 100 youngsters applying for the Grassroutes Summer Fellowship Program this year and the quality of the applications have been top-notch. As organizers, it reaffirms our belief that given the opportunity, the youth of today is eager to take the lead and actively participate in the change that’s happening at the grassroots.
6 teams have been shortlisted for the next round of interviews. Further details would be sent to the selected teams through mail.
… and the shortlisted teams are (in …

We tried our best to declare the shortlist of teams which go to the next round today- 30th April, inspite of a 3 day extension in the deadline for applying. But we are sad to inform that we would have to extend this by a day. We apologise for the delay and we want you all to be patient for another 24 hours.
The shortlisted teams will be put up  here on our blog by 8PM (IST) 1st May, 2009. Thanks for all your support and patience.

Today was supposed to be the deadline for submitting applications for Grassroutes summer edition. Due to request of lot of teams,  we are extending the deadline by another 3 days. So now the extended final deadline for submission would be 23rd April, 2009.
All the best with your applications, we hope the extra 72 hours would help you improve your applications.

Hi guys, we have found a minor glitch in the application. The link provided for part 2 after completing part 1 of the application was not working properly. It has been sorted and is working fine. So please go ahead and complete your applications. Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

If you are applying for the Grassroutes 2009 Summer Edition Fellowships, what would make for a killer mini-project that your team will have to do?
Earth Hour, in a creative manner, that will make make other youth question their own beliefs.

It has been a busy month for us here at Grassroutes, setting up the infrastructure for the next edition of our road-trips. Today we are pleased to announce that we are inviting applications for the 2009 Summer Edition.
Based on the excellent feedback given by the Fellows of Winter 2008 and advice by dozens of inspirational social entrepreneurs, journalists and change-makers, we have refurbished the program into a strong, rigorous platform tuned to enable youth to use travel as a means to become change agents.
In order to equip applicants with a …

The last few weeks have been extremely busy at our end, as we have been working to setup things required for the next edition of Grasroutes, this summer of 2009.
Add in a dash of Murphy, and we ran into a few operational issues, forcing us to delay the application process by 5 days. Sorry for that! Rest assured, on 20th March, we will throw open the gates for the application process.
On a sidenote,
We are also announcing a set of internships to work behind the scenes in a high-energy youth social …

For the past one year we have been working on the web, building Grassroutes. Starting your venture is challenging and when 8 people operate from 6 different cities it makes the journey all the more unique and novel.

Here we try to discuss the pains and joys of collaborating online, across borders, trying to create impact.

It was too late when I discovered through Vivian (on Twitter) that Muhammad Yunus was delivering a talk in Paris this week. A few minutes ago, she tweeted a summary of the talk in multiple tweets. I’m trying to put together these tweets in a single post.
Vivian says here:
Yunus gave me his Seven Principles of Grameen Social Business yesterday.

Business objective will be to ovecome poverty or one or more problems (education, health, technology access and environment) which thraten people and society; not profit maximization.
Financial and economic sustainability
Investors …

We wrote last month that one of the team members behind Grassroutes, and a Grassroutes Fellow himself - Anurag Dutta has been short-listed for the Habitat Young Visionary Award 2009. The update is that he came in second! A huge achievement in itself, bagging an internship with National Geographic in Hong Kong. Way to go, Andy!

The killer detail: Andy chose Grassroutes as his idea to tap India’s latent youth potential. Here is the slidedeck that he used in the final round.