Quest Alliance, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to equipping young individuals with 21st-century skills through technology, has helped lakhs of youngsters from marginalised communities to shape their careers.
Its Futures Literacy programme is a multifaceted skill set with profound implications. It empowers individuals by unleashing the transformative power of imagination and provides them the ability to envision a spectrum of alternate and preferred futures, all of which are grounded in principles of equity and prosperity for everyone.
It nurtures the capacity for change and encourages individuals to actively participate in the creation of transformative futures. Futures Literacy skill enables a profound understanding of the intricate interplay between the future and the present, said a research report.
Aakash Sethi, Founder and CEO, Quest Alliance said Futures Literacy enhances the imagination and the ability to prepare, recover, and invent as changes occur.
It breaks the barriers by enabling students to think about preferred and alternate futures, equips them to be more comfortable with uncertainty, and enables them to navigate the present and future potential crises with more agency and control, all while challenging the status quo.
Futures Literacy was born out of the organisation’s research in these three diverse States of Gujarat, Odisha, and Assam.
“It equips us to leverage our imaginative faculties to rethink, reinvent, and challenge the prevailing status quo. It prepares individuals to confront and navigate the uncertainty of our times with confidence and agency, particularly in the face of formidable challenges like climate change and the pervasive influence of artificial intelligence,” he added.
A research conducted by Quest Alliance across Gujarat, Odisha, and Assam has discovered that many young people tend to leave their futures to fate, passively accepting whatever comes their way.
Students from the underserved classes often imagine their future as a continuation of the present or tend to want to find the next available job and are not able to imagine alternate possibilities beyond given narratives of what the future may hold.