Why I garden.

Years ago, when my kids were little, I read them a beautiful (and my favorite) book, On Meadowview Street, by Henry Cole. It was a lovely story about a girl who moves to Meadowview Street and is surprised there are no meadows anywhere. She spots a tiny flower growing in the tall grass in her front yard and stops her dad from mowing it down. She builds a fence around it to protect it. She noticed another blossom pop up from the ground in a few days. Before she knew it, her fenced area kept growing new blossoms. Bees, butterflies, and birds came, and it grew into a beautiful meadow. All the neighbors were so inspired by her work that they stopped mowing their lawns and grew meadows in their front yard. In just a few months, Meadowview Street became an ecosystem of beautiful and harmonious meadows.

Early Childhood memories

I was very fortunate to have been born and raised in the southern part of India called the Konkan region, a lush belt of coastal beaches and native forests, an agricultural hub with rice fields, endless coconut and mango groves. Many rivers flow through this region that pour into the beautiful beaches of the Arabian sea. I grew up seeing nothing but green everywhere. Both my grandfathers were very interested in horticulture. They came from families that owned a lot of farmland and were merchants who traded agricultural products. I have many memories of walking through groves and meadows, picking fruit, and drinking tender coconut fresh off the tree. Tender coconut was my favorite. It was such a show. My grandmother would tell the caretaker to get us some tender coconut. He would tie a rope around the tree trunk and start climbing. He would climb with his bare feet and just that rope to pull him up to the top. It was fascinating and scary to watch. He would toss the coconuts down from above. We had to watch our heads when that happened. He would climb down and shave the head of the coconut with a large knife and hand it to us. When we were done drinking the water, we cut the coconut in half to eat the soft, white meat inside. On hot summer days, this was better than eating ice cream.

I grew up in a home that had a beautiful meadow in the backyard. It was wild and a place where I spent a lot of time playing. Our toys were plants, trees, fruit, and twigs. We did all kinds of things with them. I loved picking the berries and mangoes to eat with a little salt and pepper. It was heaven. We got bitten by red ants and were filthy by the end of the day, but we were so happy to be playing in the earth with the earth. Then came the dreaded television, followed by the Atari video game with its cool joystick, and all earth play stopped.

From plant killer to green thumb

When I moved to the US, I felt disconnected. Everything was different. I tried my hand at gardening but ended up killing a number of plants. Then, life got busy with school, jobs, kids, and health issues, and it took me farther and farther away from the earth. I felt I was spinning in the abyss. It wasn’t until COVID hit and life came to a standstill that I realized it was time to get back to gardening. I decided to create a summer garden to harvest my own vegetables. Within a few weeks, I was growing herbs and vegetables in small organic garden beds. Next came the house plants. One day, I spotted a hummingbird in my backyard. He came up to my face, buzzing, looking me straight in the eye. I felt like he was telling me to grow more bee and hummingbird-friendly plants. And so I did. Today, my garden is buzzing with bees, dragonflies, hummingbirds, and many species of birds. There are several pots and birdhouses that have become homes for little sparrows and robin babies. I had gone from a plant killer to a green thumb, and I was proud of what I had accomplished. Most importantly, I felt connected back to the earth of my childhood.

Becoming a gardener

Plants (like books) find you when they are ready to go home with you. I love it when plants find me. I enjoy the process of getting to know a plant and learning what its preferences are when it comes to — soil, water, and sun. It gives me great joy to watch the plant thrive. When a plant is not doing so well, I do my best to find ways to make it happy. It is incredibly fascinating to observe Mother Nature at work. She does it so effortlessly.

A great mentor is like a great gardener who takes the time to understand everything about her plants, creates an environment where they can thrive, nurtures them with the right mix of soil and water, identifies and troubleshoots issues and watches them grow. This is at the heart of my work at the Accidental Ally.

Building a garden to plant, nurture and grow disabled talent

Udyana in Sanskrit means ‘garden.’ Project Udyana is an Incubator for Inclusive Innovation. We aim to help companies establish a garden where we can ‘Plant-Nurture-Grow’ disabled talent to foster innovation. Our vision is to create an inclusive innovation incubator as a source of innovation that will generate new revenue streams for companies, aligning with their specific business strategy.

The inclusive innovation incubator may be set up inside a tech hub in a company with a shared services model to provide disability-centric insights and support to teams innovating across the company. The services provided may range from co-creating opportunities to research and testing initiatives.

Establishing a Disability Incubator will deliver business impact by —

• Addressing a growing need for product teams to connect with real users with disabilities and better understand their needs.
• Creating an in-house customer advisory comprised entirely of people with disabilities reduces your dependence on outside (and expensive) sources that do not provide relevant contextual insights to researchers and product teams.
• Tapping into an underserved market.
• Creating new revenue streams.
• Capturing the purchasing power of individuals with disabilities.
• Enhancing brand reputation by addressing social responsibility.
• Creating meaningful employment opportunities for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities, opportunities that were previously unavailable and unattainable for them.

An incubator model is best for the following reasons —

• Incubators promote innovation and creativity, encouraging a ‘test and learn’ mindset.
• Incubators emphasize user-centric design. By placing users with disabilities at the center of it, you are positioned to develop solutions that understand and address the specific needs of extreme users.
• Incubators foster a structured and supporting environment where people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities can learn, grow, and thrive.
• Incubators are agile and promote rapid development and iteration of solutions.

Following in the footsteps of my ancestors

My grandfathers were builders. They built businesses from scratch, bought land, and built wealth and prosperity not just for their children but also for people in their extended family. My grandmothers were excellent homemakers who raised their own children and the children of others in the family. They cooked for hundreds every day, took care of livestock, tended to the land, found time for philanthropy, and held everything together while their husbands focused on building their businesses.

After over two decades of working in tech for many admirable companies, I continued to feel the same feeling in my gut. I knew deep down inside that I was very far from my true north. I did the work that I had to do for financial security, but I knew that I was not doing the work I was meant to do. I spiraled with that feeling until one day, I saw a blossom in the grass. It was a group of young people with cognitive disabilities. They were all beautiful, talented, and full of life. So, I built a protective fence around them in the form of a summer internship and created a space for them to learn and grow. Then a few more came. We kept growing. A garden was forming, a beautiful meadow of people who want to do more with their lives, who are tired of being underestimated and ignored, and who are eager to prove to the world that they are capable, hardworking, and intelligent. I was proud of my work creating this garden, this meadow. Just as Caroline did, I hope to inspire others to create their own gardens in their teams and in their companies so that we can plant, nurture, and grow disabled talent.

Becoming a builder, of gardens and meadows

All these years, I felt I could never be like my grandparents, who did so much with limited resources and guidance. Today, I see what I have built, with limited resources and I am blown away by how far we have come in a short period of time. It started with one little blossom, Rohan Bhupatiraju, who innocently and deliberately wanted to pursue a big vision for his life. In the process, he has enabled others to do the same.

Together, we have created this Udyana (the sankrit word for garden), and ,there will be more Udyana’s everywhere from here on.

A final story

A few years ago, I planted a row of camellias in my backyard. For years, I cared for them and ensured they got what they needed, but none of them flowered. I would walk the neighborhood admiring the flowering camellias in my neighbor’s yards and wonder what I was doing wrong. Why weren’t my camellias blooming? Then, one day, I stepped into my garden early in the morning, and there she was, a big, bright, beautiful white bloom — my heart lept. I stood there looking at the bloom, tears streaming down my eyes. In a matter of days, all the other camellias started to bloom. The time had come for them to express themselves. There were white, pink, crimson camellias everywhere.

At Accidental Ally, our mission is to create career pathways for people with cognitive disabilities. It has taken us some time to get here, but the time has come for us to bloom!

“Now there really was a Meadow on Meadowview Street and a home for everyone” — On Meadownview Street, By Henry Cole.