Case Study - Priyanka

Priyanka is studying in Class 6 and 15 years old. She has been associated with us since our inception in 2009. Her father works as a construction worker while her mother is a housemaid. Priyanka is very hardworking and good in studies. She is always ready to go the extra mile and put in her best in whatever she does. She enjoys singing and dancing. Priyanka wants to be a doctor in future and we will do our best to support her in whatever way we can. All the best Priyanka!

Science Workshop by NSIT Volunteers

It was summer vacations and we decided to teach the children some science concepts in an interactive manner by demonstrating some live experiments. Students from NSIT joined as volunteers for this 6-week long workshop for the senior children at Jaagriti.

Volunteers focused on teaching the children about life around us, health and hygiene, living organisms, importance of energy, matter, earth and the food chain. For every session, volunteers prepared in advance some charts, puzzles and experiments for demonstrating to the children. It was a great workshop which not only helped the children in learning more about the world but also the volunteers in developing their soft skills. We hope to conduct more such workshops on a regular basis.

Sadbhavana 2013

Continuing with the tradition, we organised our 4^th annual day, Sadbhavana, with Rotaract Club of NSIT Regency. Numerous activities were organised across the day. The whole auditorium was decorates with ribbons and balloons.

The event started with a talent round where small children displayed their talent of dancing, singing and acting in front of such a large crowd. The confidence of these children was unmatched for. The highlight of the session was a comedy act by two children, and a few jokes by others which made the audience laugh out loud! The children were judged by a panel of judges which comprised few 4^th year students and an ex-president of Rotaract of the batch 2010-2011, and prizes were given out to the best performers.

Then an art and craft workshop in association with Canvas was held at the green room. The students were taught to make flowers out of various coloured origami sheets. It was a very difficult task as they had to fold sheets of paper with their little hands and very less experience of origami but the most surprising thing was when everyone completed their jobs and a whole bouquet of flowers was made out of it. It reminded us of the flowers around the campus. Magical!!

After all the hard work, refreshments were distributed and then was the movie time ! Despicable Me!, a cartoon movie was screened for children. Even the volunteers had their share of fun with some phrases like “pinky promise” being relayed all over the auditorium. The cute characters and the sweet dialogues were just loved by everyone. After one and a half hours fun, a small dancing-cum-jam session was also conducted where all the kids danced to the tunes of some popular numbers. The last event was a lemon and spoon race held in the lawns. The competition was tough but we had winners from girls and boys who took away exciting prizes. At the end, tiffin boxes were distributed to all the children as a return gift.

The whole idea of such an event was to bring joy to such underprivileged kids. We all have fests and annual days in our college and schools and therefore it was an initiative to bring such an experience to them also.

Checkout more pictures on our Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/jaagriti

Life Skills Workshop for Girls

A life skills workshop was conducted especially for the girls studying at Jaagriti for a period of 7 weeks. The workshop aimed to empower the underprivileged girls with necessary “life skills” and knowledge, which can help them make better decisions as they become adults and plan for their future. We believe that with these skills girls would be able to protect themselves from being hurt by others, study well, enjoy a better living and plan for their careers in future. Moreover, they will be able to live their lives independently with dignity and not be always dependent on others. The content of the workshop was developed with support from an NGO, Touching Lives, Mumbai.

Every Sunday, a number of exercises and modules were conducted by the volunteers - Rachna, Richa, Anindya and Richa Sharma. To make the workshops both fun & informative, tools like story recital, games, role playing, experience sharing, etc. were used. On a broader note, topics like self awareness, understanding one's emotions & thoughts, anger management, communication skills and value educations were covered.

By the end of the workshop, some small changes like better cooperation among the children and anger management could be noticed. We are planning to these sessions on a regular basis to make a larger impact on the lives of the girls at Jaagriti.

Volunteer Experience Sharing

Teaching students have always been my passion as I personally feel enlightened on teaching someone. This is particularly because I am quite fed up from the system of education that prevails in INDIA, where we are asked to tell students to cramp the writings and not understand its relevance, its importance and very importantly, as to whether is it really needed for us to learn this? Because of these reasons only, I had only bookish knowledge till I cleared 10+2, after which I got to learn life in detail, and got to understand as to how things work in our country and many other things. At JAAGRITI, I got a chance to experiment my theory that says that many things can be learned outside books as used to happen in Ancient INDIA in VEDIC time. Fortunately, working here, it worked out. The kind of response that I received from students made me delighted and I got to learn a lot from them.

Many a times they made me feel that I need to grow up as a human being as I am not even aware about my surroundings, the trees, the kind of effort that goes in making my one day and, thus, I need to work on it to become a good human altogether. This is quite relevant as after having finished the workshops, I have started running in morning hours for about 3-4 Km(s) daily to strengthen my body from inside. Also, I have started to study about plants and their various species available around us especially medicinal plants, so that if I get to do another workshop in future, I will have a rich resource of knowledge to share with these children. Thus, this experience that I had here, made me a new kind of personality all together.

Working with people of different thoughts, different interests, and having different ideologies for life is always difficult. This I realized while working in a group. This experience made me realize the fact as to why companies must be conducting GD’s and Group activities as part of their selection procedure, because, this is a great way to judge a person’s flexibility with different people around him/her. Also working in a group made me realize one more interesting fact that working without a leader is very difficult. Because none of the group member was termed a leader and we had to work out things and content beforehand by mutual interaction, some points or activities remained a part of conflict even on the day of delivery of the workshop. Thus, in many ways these workshops were a tutor of human psychology to me. In all this was a brilliant effort on part of the organisers of the workshop to provide students with something new, and a rich experience that I will personally remember for my life time.

- Aman Gupta, NSIT