Our three founding staff members have over 40 years of collective experience living and working alongside Hindu communities, both in India and in North America, as students of Hindu culture and as social entrepreneurs. We also have over 20 years of collective experience facilitating cultural learning programs for North Americans traveling to India for educational or business opportunities and those with Hindu neighbors or coworkers in North America. Over the years, we have become well-networked with many other cultural learning facilitators with diverse experience in various places around the world. A few of these have become our mentors and many of these have become our curriculum development consultants and community liaisons.

The vision that became Pranām Collaborative Learning Services started with a growing sensitivity to cultural and communal tensions between people from North American Christian communities and people from Hindu communities. It took several years to identify the best resources available for understanding and preventing these tensions and then to integrate them into our own lives and into the cultural learning programs we facilitated. In those earlier years, our focus was on content, but we eventually came to the conviction that delivering content does not make learning happen, no matter how good the content is. We began educating ourselves in adult learning methodology.

It was a defining paradigm shift for us when we realized that life transforming learning is always collaborative, meaning actively working together with others to take new information, new ideas, and new skills and integrate them with what we already know or use them to reorganize what we thought we knew. The science of collaborative learning confirmed and enlightened many of the convictions we had come to through our own observations over the years. Collaborative learning requires authentic relationships built on mutual appreciation and a willingness to engage in critical self-reflection. Every person from every culture has valuable insights and experiences to share. We each have much to humbly learn from the other.

The story of Pranām Collaborative Learning Services is the story of how collaborative learning has come to define our lives and our relationships with the diverse people and communities around us. We would love to invite you into that story.