Here I come back, after a gap of 6 yrs since my first half marathon.

This one is a tribute to teachers – they play a very important role in shaping up a personality and educating us. As I learnt across couple of phases of my life, our teachers passionately impart their own knowledge, experience and values into us. In effect it’s the teacher who makes learning fun and exciting, while shaping a person to take on many a challenge with ease. Later in life they can also be seen in coaches, mentors and trainers. They can come in the form of your mother, father, grand parents, Ram Singh sir, Agarwal sir, Fr. Tom, Bro. James...many, many others who are ‘skilled to teach’, through the journey of life.

I have decided to run another half marathon and raise funds for CEQUE – Centre for Equity and Quality in Universal Education.

I have now run a total of ten 21.2km runs, a few long rides on a bicycle with some equally crazy friends, a couple of treks, a 7hr night run as a challenge, again with a crazy friend – all these since the first half marathon that I ran in 2014. 

I’m running the half marathon at the TATA Mumbai Marathon 2020 to support CEQUE a nonprofit organization that believes every child deserves a great teacher, a teacher who can provide the education they deserve.
 
CEQUE runs a Teacher Innovator Fellowship for motivated government and low cost school teachers in Maharashtra. From a pool of hundreds of applicants, it selects a cohort of 60 teachers each year, with whom they work intensively over a year. The Fellows are coached to use learning data and enquiry-based teaching strategies that make learning interesting and relevant to students - strategies that enable student learning.
 
Since 2016, the Fellowship has reached 142 teachers across 7 districts in Maharashtra, impacting the learning of 4260 students. Average student learning has increased by 15 percentage points and 21% teachers moved to ‘Expert’ in teacher competency scale, up from 0% at the start of the program.

This year, my target is to raise 20,00,000 in support of 20 teachers.