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

Final Examinations

Come March and it is time for the children to get busy studying day and night for their final school examinations. To get our children prepared in advance for the exams, we conducted an internal final examination at end of February and also had some volunteers take up doubt classes. 

We are glad to inform you that all children have performed well and got promoted to new classes. Congratulations to all the children and volunteers!

English Learning Classes

Our experience with Jaagriti introduced us to a side of Delhi that we knew existed, but never had a chance to interact with.  Our group of friends spent over a month trying to teach a class of underprivileged children English. The class was an assortment of children between the ages of 8 and 15. The classes took place in a room in one of the student's house, with no fans. The hot Delhi summer made it harder for the students to concentrate and so we had to make our classes really interactive to keep the students engaged.

The 7 week long program began with a test to assess the students' proficiency in the language, so that we could proceed in a structured manner. Teaching them English was not as easy as we expected it to be, in order to help them learn we decided to make worksheets for them. This kept us on our heels because we had to do a lot of reading ourselves so that we could make worksheets that helped them strengthen their flaws, while at the same time could be solved easily with a little deliberation.

No matter how difficult it got at times, the enthusiasm displayed by the students for learning a new language and the happiness we experienced when they conversed with us in good English, kept us going and made the 7 weeks at Jaagriti a memorable experience. 

- Abhishek and Sakshi

Life Skills Workshop by LFT

Over the years we have felt a strong need to go beyond the classroom education and provide the children with certain “life skills” which can help them in dealing with various physical and mental challenges they encounter as they grow into adults. Some of these challenges include low self esteem, lack of confidence, social discrimination, poor communication skills etc. We believe these life skills would help the children to study well, develop their personality, enjoy a better living and plan well for their future.

With this in mind, we collaborated with LEADERS FOR TOMORROW (LFT), a not-for-profit youth leadership movement established mainly in college campuses. LFT conducts LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT programmes, SKILLS development programmes and SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT programmes to create LEADERS FOR TOMORROW…!! IGNITING YOUNG MINDS (IYM) is a LEADERS FOR TOMORROW initiative in which they train volunteers from colleges to be the trainers for SOFT SKILLS. Every weekend, these volunteers devote 2 hours to impart soft skills lessons for underprivileged children.

LFT started its LIFE SKILLS workshop with Jaagriti in February for a period of 6 weeks. A group of volunteers came every Sunday and spent 2 hours doing interactive games and activities. Other activities included storytelling, drawing, colouring, word association and role plays focused on building communication skills, moral and social skills, etiquettes, personal hygiene and general knowledge. ‎All the children seemed very happy and actively took part in the activities. They worked independently and behaved well with the volunteers. As most of the volunteers were first or second year college students and were having their first volunteer experience, they were quite nervous initially but the children made them feel very comfortable and followed their instruction carefully. One of the volunteers remarked – “Working with Jaagriti children was a great experience. We won’t ever forget this in our life, each day we spend with these children was a new lesson of life. Thank you Jaagriti for this opportunity.”

The results of the workshop have been very encouraging. The children now exchange pleasant greetings with each other, treat their elders with respect, wash their hands properly before and after every meal, have their nails trimmed, know the meaning of the traffic lights and are also aware of many morals and virtues by way of stories. We can proudly say that these children along with many others like them are on their way to become well mannered and responsible young citizens.

- Bhawana Rana 

Case Study - Sangeeta

Sangeeta is one of the most hardworking and dedicated students at Jaagriti. She has been associated with us for last 3 years and has recently appeared for her Class 10th board exams. Her father works as a rickshaw puller while her mother is a housemaid.

Inspired by our Master Ji, she wants to become a teacher in future. We have seen she has a great potential to become a good teacher. She has a good rapport with all the children, who listen to her carefully. Sometime she also helps Master Ji in taking classes and teaching the primary school kids.

We have made her a promise - Jaagriti will provide her all the necessary support and financial resources to help her become a qualified teacher. Not only this, her first job as a teacher will be with Jaagriti. Wish you ALL THE BEST Sangeeta!

4th Birthday Celebrations

February 10th and it was time for the 4th Birthday Celebrations of Jaagriti. What started with a group of just 10 children and 2 volunteers in 2009, has now made a positive impact in the lives of over 200 children from 5 communities and over 150 families. To celebrate the day, we decided to get together all the volunteers at the project, cut cake with the children and organize a good feast for them. All the children enjoyed very much and ate lots of cake and aloo poori. :)

Financial Literacy Workshop

FLAY organized an interactive workshop on financial literacy for Jaagriti children on February 24^th 2013. Around fifty students from different age group participated in the workshop. The aim of the workshop was to teach the students some basics about finance, why it is important to save money and how to save money and role played by banks. We believe this would help the children in better planning of their future and careers. Specifically, following topics were covered -

·         History of money

·         Inspirational life story of Warren Buffet

·         Workings of a Bank

·         Important concepts such as Savings, Deposits, Loans, Interest rates, Collateral

·         Business Structures - proprietorship, partnership and corporation

·         Inflation and introduction to time value of money

·         Towards the end we showed them a video clip from the movie Guru explaining basics of stock market operations.

All the students enjoyed the session. It was a learning experience for them as well as for the FLAY team since the kids are really smart and astute. We hope to do more such interactive workshops with the Jaagriti children in future.

About FLAY

Financial Literacy Among Youth (FLAY) is an initiative by MBA college students to spread financial literacy and make the young generation of India aware about the money market. Our team believes that "It's not your salary that makes you rich, but your spending and investing habits".

Our idea is to make students well equipped in this financial world, so that they are able to interpret the various financial happenings around them and are informed of the changes taking place in this dynamic economy.

FLAY conducts workshops for school students under which there are four different modules. We also conduct workshops in NGO’s wherein we focus more on delivering the absolute basic knowledge which will prove helpful for the students throughout.

- Kanika Mahendru (FLAY Team)

Republic Day Celebrations

In association with the Sparsh club of Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management (LBSIM), Dwarka, Republic Day was celebrated at our project. Several management students from LBSIM volunteered to organize the event. The children were very enthusiastic and prepared various songs, dances and play for everyone. Many of them recited wonderful and patriotic poems in English as well as Hindi. Some of them delivered amazing patriotic essays as well. Once they were through with the poems and essays, they went on to enact a play for us wherein they portrayed the importance of right to information for people. Also they tried to show the plight of the people living in the rural areas in relation to the presence of the faulty police structure and problems faced due to it. This was followed by a patriotic dance performance by beautiful girls of Jaagriti. On demand of the children, the volunteers also joined them in singing and dancing.

Prizes were given by Master Ji to the students who stood first and second in their respective classes. This was followed by giving away of refreshments to the students by the volunteers. Overall it was a wonderful experience. The students are very intelligent and responsive and it was great to spend time with them. I would like to thank Jaagriti for giving us this wonderful opportunity and hope for many more such opportunities in the future as well.

- Kanika Mahendru (LBSIM)