Help 50 Mumbai street kids from the Vatsalya Center enrich their lives long-term through parkour: provide self-confidence, positive body image, problem-solving skills, and tenacity in setting and achieving goals.
The children who come to Vatsalya Homeless Center from the streets have often run away from home, extracting themselves from traumatic environments of conflict and abuse, ill-treatment, acute poverty and hunger, and despair. Many have been sent away, their families possessing insufficient resources to care for them. Girls specifically live a hard life. This upbringing creates a lack of self-esteem, leaves them feeling alone, ignored, and marginalized by the metropolitan world of Mumbai.
With these donations Parkour Visions will send certified parkour instructor Cordelia Storm to Mumbai for the month of September. She will work at the Vatsalya Foundation, a center housing about 50 underprivileged youth. Cordelia will provide structured, progressive parkour instruction to the residents, focusing on empowering them to be in charge of themselves, to approach obstacles as opportunities, and to focus on conquering limits and fears.
Parkour teaches a set of skills that is more than just jumping off of things. Practitioners of parkour see their world in a different way: obstacles become opportunities, seemingly insurmountable challenges can be broken down into achievable goals. Indian street youth, through learning parkour, will build skills that will help them face obstacles throughout their lives.