Backers
AS
Anuraag Srivastava
₹100.00
Who are we ?
Abhilasha Foundation was set up to honour the memory of a young girl who came into this world and left before she could experience its beauty and wonders. What she left behind were memories of unprecedented courage, immense perseverance and undying hope, and the Foundation tries through its activities to honour these memories by working with young children and ensuring they can hope for a better future and for a fuller life
The foundation is based in the recently formed state of Jharkhand in India, which has a high percentage of forest or rural dwelling tribal population. These people have been, and have been in the grip of a vicious cycle of poverty led by an agrarian lifestyle haunted by progressively reducing land-holdings with each generation, overt dependence on vanishing forests for sustenance and low awareness of opportunities and rights. Given the historically oppressed situation, children are looked at as a source of income and form a significant labor pool. Culturally the tribes engage their children in vocational work to add to the family income, with education clearly not being a focus.
Who do we help?
One solution to this is the formation of a “child care” system (balwadis) in the villages while educating the parents that the minor amount of vocational help their children provide is far out-weighed by longer term benefits of education and overall development, it having the interventional capability to break them out of their negative cycle. Incentivising this by also providing basic benefits like meals, clothes, etc. free in the balwadis helps in pulling in quite a big population of tribal children into the child care system. The foundation makes sure the village has skin in the game by asking the villagers to provide it with an area / house to serve as the school. Abhilasha Foundation has chosen this method of intervention to help the children of these communities.
What do we do?
The Foundation is focused on the following tasks:
- Running a chain of Balwadis or para-schools in villages for children in the age group 3-8 years. The schools are staffed with the most educated people from the village, and focus on providing elementary education (Mathematics, science, art/craft, social skills) in addition serving as a nucleus for basic healthcare (vaccinations, check-ups) and wellbeing (distribution of clothes, blankets, school material etc.)
- Inculcating discipline and grooming habits in tribal children.
- Working with district authorities to ensure adequate government aid or intervention is provided to these communities whenever such a scheme is launched. It has helped in having tube wells / pump sets have been installed in these villages, panchayat huts been made and blankets distributed whenever such a scheme has been launched by the government. It thus acts as both an influencer and a monitoring agency for these villages.
The Foundation currently runs 7 schools and touches the lives of almost 600 children. Our plans are to scale this up significantly in the near future.