It's time to accelerate India's education NGOs

Atma‘s founder, Hayley Bolding, awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) by the Australian Government
We're so proud to have an inspiring woman leading the way for us and changing the face of education NGOs in India. This award recognises the collective effort and commitment of everyone involved with Atma. It is because of your love and support that we have grown and scaled greater heights. We are proud to share this recognition with you and look forward to sharing many more successes!

The Gati initiative is enabling mainstream Mumbai schools to provide high quality, inclusive education
Our Gati project got featured in Newz Hook, a news channel with a special focus on disability-related news in India! Know more about our project Gati and the need for inclusive education from our consortium members. Read the article here. 

Partner Feature: Child Safeguarding Awareness
A child's safety is of the utmost importance to Atma as an organisation. As we and most of our partner organisations work directly or indirectly with children, we conducted Child Safeguarding Workshops for our staff, volunteers, and partners to create awareness about child abuse, and child safeguarding policies and procedures. These will be followed by a Risk Assessment and Safeguarding Policy implementation for our partner organisations in the coming months.

Gati Inclusion Workshop - November 22, 2018

On November 22, we conducted our much awaited Gati Inclusion Workshop where 19 schools (33 participants) were represented by teachers, Headmasters, Supervisors, Counselors and Coordinators. The free event was organised to create awareness about making mainstream schools inclusive and accessible for all. The event gave each school access to 1/3 resources across pedagogy, screening, behaviour management, that they could take back and implement in their respective schools and classrooms. The Gati team will be monitoring implementation over the next 3 months, tracking how useful the tools have been to individual classrooms. 

Red Flag Project by Sonali Saini of Sol's ARC 

The focus of this workshop was on identifying student needs. The participants learnt how to identify possible causes for why a learner is struggling, what are the immediate next steps, and how to identify strugglers without labelling them. 

"The session will be very useful for our teachers to understand each student's needs. It will be our pleasure if the Gati team arranges the session for our school," says Mohsin Khan, Headmaster of  M. H. English School in Malwani. 

Sensory Integration by Franzina Coutinho of Inspirium Holistic Care  

In this workshop, participants were provided with a Sensory Tool Kit. They learnt how to identify issues with sensory integration, strategies to respond to categories of sensory issues in the classroom, and how to create a sensory grid for managing behaviours in the classroom. 

Veena Jadhav, a teacher from Rishi Valmiki Eco School in Mumbai, says, "The workshop was very interactive and helpful for quick implementation in the classroom. We learnt various techniques to involve all the children with different capacities. The major take away was exercises and designing of lesson plan where we keep every child's need in mind."

Managing Learning Needs by Shamin Mehrotra of Ummeed

Here the participants were taught strategies on understanding learning disabilities, how they manifest in the classroom, and how best to support children experiencing learning difficulties in the classroom. 

Alpa Satoor, a teacher from Auxilium School in Mumbai, said in her feedback that, "The LD workshop was nice, informative and useful for all teachers."