Help us tell our story.

A Place for Us is one of four projects chosen in 2023 as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Community Initiative which supports a growing community of changemakers around the world.

This project brings a fresh approach to the way we look at holistic education. While its integral arts and nature based programmes serve the needs of rurally marginalised children who face abject and/ or social and emotional poverty, an essential part of the project is the way programme facilitators attune to their own ‘inner landscapes’ before doing any outer work. By doing their own ‘inner work’ (meditation, shadow work and group work) which facilitates presence, authenticity and connection, facilitators, experiencing less burnout and more resilience, are better able to serve the children’s basic needs as well as build community together and find a shared sense of meaning and purpose.

Our documentary looks at how this ‘inner work’ can overcome the barriers that inhibit our capacity to change ourselves and facilitate change within our local and global communities.

The first programme started one year ago in Neemka Village, Uttar Pradesh, India, serving children and teenagers who are experiencing abject poverty. Children of poor farm labourers, they are often forced to work long hours on the land alongside their parents. As a result of this, they miss a lot of school which leads to illiteracy, and as a result, fewer opportunities for moving out of the vicious cycle of poverty. A Place for Us provides food as well as education to these children on programme days.

The project supported a similar arts and nature programme in Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry, Ireland, between April and December 2023 for rurally marginalised young people in a European context. The second phase of this programme will begin in Summer 2024.

Due to the importance of sustaining this project, documentary team Bláthnaid O’Toole and Killian Casey have offered to help us tell our story, so that we can become more visible in our area in Uttar Pradesh, India, and attract more sponsors. While they have offered their services freely to us, we need to make sure that their travel, accommodation, and equipment rental costs are covered. Ideally, we would also like to cover the time they spend editing footage, as when they are doing that they cannot accept other work.

Practicalities

Documentary Team

Killian Casey is an award winning writer/ producer from Dublin. He has over five years of experience as a producer, across a range of short films, commercials, documentaries and music videos. As well as this, he has worked in the Irish film industry for the past three years, working on titles such as Netflix's 'Vikings: Valhalla' and NBCUniversal's 'Abducting Abigail'. In January 2023 he co-founded the production company All My Friends with writer/ producer Philip Emo.

Bláthnaid O’Toole is a filmmaker and cinematographer from the Dingle peninsula, County Kerry. Some of her most recent work in 2022 was camera operating on the feature documentary, ‘Million Dollar Kids’, about child trafficking. Parts of the documentary were shot in Dublin, Liverpool and Texas and is currently in post production. In June 2023, her short film ‘Dreamers’ was screened at K-Fest, County Kerry. This short film also screened at the London BFI and was shortlisted for the BFI Future Film Festival in 2019. Bláthnaid has done the sound design on works such as ‘Climb Not’ and ‘A Mother’s Gift’.

A Place for Us Co-Ordinators

Adi Vickers is a holistic educator and post graduate researcher trained in Counselling, NLP, hypnotherapy and integral facilitation. She co-founded Asana International School in 1993 in Ireland and has also worked in Italy, Spain, Laos and India. She set up a teacher training programme for Food for Life in Vrindavan, India, in 2015. She created and delivered an online programme for teachers called "Integrative Practice for Heart-Centred Teachers'' as part of Alef Trust's Conscious Community Project in 2021. Together with Rahul Nagar she set up A Place for Us in early 2023.

Rahul Nagar is the Indian coordinator of A Place for Us, in Neemka Village, India. With an educational background in chartered accountancy and finance, and a personal background in meditation and Kriya yoga, he is passionate about including financial education as an essential element in the integral curriculum for children and teenagers, especially in a rural Indian context. He is currently doing a Master's in Risk Management at Pisa University, Italy, where he is gaining international perspectives in preparation for developing a permanent integral school for rurally marginalised children and teenagers in India.