Leena Cramer (Chicago, Illinois) and Nancy (New York) along with Manish Jain conducted a workshop on “Art of Hosting” at Shikshantar today.

They collectively conducted it under the banner of “Pro-Action Café”. The idea behind the approach is to pragmatically deal with the social issues related to our community.

While talking to Nancy and Leena, they told UT that everywhere round the globe, people seem to talk a lot about various issues and how if given a chance they would work on them.

So Pro-Action Café provides them a platform to come together and discuss those issues, and at the end everyone should come up with ‘the next step’ to solve those issues.

The people here have to finalize their ‘next step’ towards solving those problems. Finalizing the step is not enough; the person has to declare it in front of all the people that what they will do to resolve that issue.

Nancy told us that she is part of Art of Hosting concept from past 10 years, and Leena joined this concept 3 years back. They run this concept globally with a view that every person facing any issue or difficulty in a community should do something instead of just talking about it.

When asked them about the response they get, they said, “We have seen many individuals who have come out happily after these discussions because what they are facing is then discussed and an individual gets a clear view on what should be done to uproot the issue.”

They said that this concept is flying globally and they also get support from their online global portals namely www.artofhosting.ning.com  and www.artofhosting.org.

Manish is also a member of this group and he would be helping them through his contacts to organize their next workshop in New Delhi.

They will put the issues of clean water, good political involvement in community etc there. They also mentioned that, they do follow up the people who make declarations in these workshops towards solving the issues.

Concluding the conversation, they mentioned some of the key issues in India that require immediate focus are Population growth, Inclination towards Western Economic Scene, Education and Women Empowerment.