Our story
Thirty children. Every Sunday. For years now.
None of it was planned. Here is how it started.
Kampung Pemulung Karang Pola · Jakarta Selatan
Breaking cycles, expanding possibilities.
A small community building an environment where children want to learn — and where learning actually leads somewhere.
0
children, ages 3–13
0
core team members
0+
external volunteers
Sundays
every week, 2–3 hours
The place
500 meters from one of Jakarta's best public high schools.
That is how close Karang Pola sits to opportunity. The distance is short — the gap is enormous. What the community taught us is that education was never the whole story: the barriers start long before a child ever enters a classroom.
Legal barriers
Missing documents keep children out of the system before they can even enrol.
Educational barriers
Gaps compound early, and there is rarely anyone able to help a child catch up.
Structural barriers
Income, housing and health shape whether school is possible at all.
The beginning
Where it all began
Bersama Belajar was never part of the original plan. A thesis became a lifelong commitment once it was clear that research alone would never change children's realities — so research turned into long-term community engagement.
“If education wasn't the only problem, it couldn't be the only solution.”
So we changed the question — from “How can we teach them?” to “How can education become a pathway to a different future?”
Four learning pillars
and, above all of them, hope01
Academic learning
02
Character development
03
Future readiness
04
Community connection
Progress
What we measure
Academic indicators
Basic reading; English reading, grammar, vocabulary and speaking; mathematics; and a target set for the next assessment.
Socio-emotional indicators
More confident, more respectful, more curious, more expressive — and more willing to dream.
How we teach
Level-based curriculumInteractive gamesStorytellingReading habitsEnglish conversationsSmall-group learning
Beyond the classroom
“Community work begins where classrooms end.”
Beyond teaching, we also try to help with:
Legal identity applicationsConnecting families to healthcareEmergency referralsCoordinating with partnersRaising awarenessWorking with government institutionsBuilding trust with parents
Looking ahead
What's next?
- 01A permanent learning center
- 02A scholarship pathway
- 03Deeper stakeholder engagement
- 04Youth mentorship
- 05A replicable community-learning model
Building something that lasts
Two kinds of sustainability we work on in parallel.
Financial sustainability
- Corporate social responsibility
- Grants
- Individual donors
- Partnerships
Organizational sustainability
- Volunteer handbook
- Knowledge management & documentation
- Monitoring & evaluation
- Leadership development
So, who are we?
Five core team members, more than twenty external volunteers, and a growing set of institutional collaborations — meeting the children of Karang Pola every Sunday.
Meet the whole team →Collaboration
From New York to Jakarta
Working with students and researchers at Columbia University on how a small community-learning model can grow without losing what makes it work.
Open questions
Questions we'd love to discuss
We don't have all the answers. The most meaningful work is never done alone — tap a question to see where our thinking is.
Right now we run on goodwill, personal contributions and small collaborations. We are building a mix of CSR partnerships, grants and individual donors so a single quiet month never puts Sunday at risk.
Test scores are the easy part. We also track confidence, curiosity, respect, expression and whether a child is willing to talk about their future at all — and we are still looking for better ways to do it honestly.
Parents here work long, unpredictable hours. Engagement cannot mean meetings — it means showing up in the kampung, being useful with documents and healthcare, and earning trust slowly.
Come build the environment with us.
Three ways to be part of it — every one of them starts with a conversation.