Growing Alongside the Work We Do: APNA's Individual Development Journeys
23rd June,2026| At APNA, we often speak of the people we serve from the applicant filling out a pension form for the first time to the labourer registering for a card that will change how they access work. But behind every camp, every consultation, and every form filed, there is a team that is also, quietly and deliberately, growing. This is the idea behind our Individual Development Plan (IDP): the belief that growth cannot be left to chance, and that every member of the team from the Secretary to the Field Coordinator deserves a clear, structured path to keep building on their craft.
This year, that belief has taken shape in very real ways.
Faizan: Listening to the System's Cracks
For Md Faizan, our Secretary and Project Manager, the journey took him into rooms where civil society organisations, researchers, and frontline workers gathered to talk about something deeply technical yet deeply human which was Aadhaar-linked welfare delivery. At the Libtech consultation on Aadhaar challenges, Faizan sat alongside practitioners from across the food security and social protection space, exchanging on-ground realities and helping shape advocacy priorities for engaging with the state. And in between all this outward learning, he also spent five days at the SAMARPANDEEP Training Centre for a course on CSO financial management, the kind of investment that rarely shows up in registration numbers but quietly strengthens everything else we do.
Sapna: Building People, One System at a Time
Sapna Gupta, our People Operations Lead and Project Coordinator, walked a similar path through the Libtech consultation, bringing her own lens on how welfare delivery challenges affect the people we recruit, train, and deploy in the field. But her development didn't stop there. Alongside Nidhi, she spent ten days in May 2026 immersed in a course on Local Democracy and Welfare Entitlements while moving through the evolution of Panchayati Raj, participatory planning, and how SHGs and civil society can drive real change when they work with, rather than around, local governments. For someone whose job is to keep people and systems aligned, this was a chance to see governance from its very roots.
Ehtesham: From Canva to MIS
Md Ehtesham Anwar, our Field Coordinator and MIS Officer, has been sharpening his toolkit in two very different but complementary directions. On one end, he picked up Canva through a self-driven online course; a small but powerful addition that has already begun shaping how our field reports and camp materials look and communicate. On the other hand, he has been a regular at the MIS-focused sessions under the Dhwani Saksham cohort, deepening his grip on the data systems that keep APNA's field operations accountable and traceable.
Nidhi: Designing for Partnerships
Nidhi Suman, our Vice President for Outreach and Partnerships, has been attending the programme management and designing sessions within the Dhwani cohort sessions that speak directly to her role of building bridges with funders, government bodies, and institutional stakeholders. Combined with her time at the Azim Premji University studying local democracy and welfare entitlements, Nidhi's learning this year has been about scale: how to design programmes and partnerships that hold up under real-world complexity.
Hunar: Where Law Meets the Ground
Hunar Malik, our Programme Director and Legal Executive, travelled to Bengaluru for the ten-day course on Local Democracy and Welfare Entitlements, and separately, sat through a three-day training with the VV Giri Institute on the gig economy and platform workers. What stayed with Hunar most was the honesty of the sessions and not just describing what exists, but interrogating what should exist, and where the law is still catching up to a rapidly changing world of work.
One Cohort, Many Paths
A common thread runs through all of this: our engagement with the Dhwani Foundation's Saksham programme, a 13-month organisational strengthening initiative that APNA was selected for among 31 partner organisations. True to our IDP philosophy, our team doesn't attend Dhwani as a single unit where each member joins the sessions most relevant to their responsibilities, whether that's governance and compliance, MIS, or programme design.
Growth, at APNA, is never stagnant. It is built one course, one consultation, one conversation at a time.