Aswathy Preetha Jayakumar

Founder

Aswathy Preetha Jayakumar is the founder of Ayang Trust (2017)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education, livelihood, tribal welfare and women & children from Majuli.

Aswathy Preetha Jayakumar is an Indian educator and one of the three co-founders of Ayang Trust, a non-profit organisation registered in November 2017 that works with tribal communities on Majuli island in Assam.

She leads the organisation's education work, which centres on The Hummingbird School, an alternative school on the island.

Early life and education

Jayakumar grew up in Kerala and trained as an engineer at the Dubai campus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS Pilani). She was a fellow of Teach For India in Mumbai, and later took a master's degree in peace education in Costa Rica.

Career

The Hummingbird School was established in January 2017 as a joint effort with nineteen villages of the Mising tribe on Majuli, the initiative of Bipin Dhane, an engineering graduate of IIT Kharagpur who had begun teaching there as a volunteer. Jayakumar joined him at Majuli, as did Dharamjeet Kumar, and in November 2017 the three registered Ayang Trust as a charitable trust.

Ayang works on education and livelihoods with marginalised tribal communities in north-east India. Jayakumar heads its education vertical.[2][3][4][5]

Ayang Trust

Ayang Trust ('Ayang' means love in the Mising tribal language) is registered under the Indian Trusts Act, formed in 2017 out of the earlier Hummingbird School set up by 19 Mising villages on Majuli, Assam — the world's largest inhabited river island. It runs the Hummingbird model school, weekly community-library sessions now reaching 2,000+ children across dozens of government schools, and livelihood and disaster-risk-reduction programmes for women farmers and artisans, including flood-affected families, across Assam and into Arunachal Pradesh.

Ayang Trust reports the following, on its own site: