By Chirag Sutar | Communications Coordinator
Atma has selected six NGOs from Mumbai to be a part of the Atma Accelerator Program. The selected NGOs will be a part of Cohort 2015 and receive 1200 hours of support per year for the next three years along with one dedicated Partnership Manager and three skilled volunteers to help their NGOs become bigger, better and stronger.
Atma’s ‘Cohort 2015’ and 'Special-Ed Cohort 2015' has NGOs with huge potential that work on providing quality education to underprivileged children, children with special needs, and vulnerable girls.
Atma’s Executive Director, Mary Ellen Matsui says, “In our due diligence we found that some education NGOs were doing phenomenal work at the grass-roots level. We were impressed by their work and their potential to achieve more. All those NGOs are now a part of ‘Cohort 2015’. Atma will be supporting them through the Accelerator Program for the next three years and help them reach out to more beneficiaries by scaling their programs and making them sustainable. We are excited to work with some of the most promising education NGOs in Mumbai.”
Urja Trust, one of the six NGOs that is part of Cohort 2015, has been working at grass-roots level with girls from vulnerable backgrounds in Mumbai for the last 15 years.
Deepali Vandana, Managing Trustee, Urja Trust says, “Youth between 18 to 30 years is a young, energetic group whose energies must be harnessed well. If each girl in India who reaches or is about to reach young adulthood isn't given development opportunities, she will be susceptible to becoming homeless. For this reason, we also need to expand our work with families and communities. While Urja has leaders with vast grass-roots level experience, it needs concrete management skills, so that we can scale our work and increase the visibility of our cause in the world at large. We believe that Urja aligns with Atma's ideologies and Atma's vision, in that Atma seeks to facilitate the empowerment of grass-root level stakeholders in order to ultimately reach out to beneficiaries.”
Another NGO A B Foundation (also known by the name Sai Sweekar), caters to children with special needs in Virar and Thane region. One of its founders is Meena Nikam - she has been instrumental in initiating ‘Home Based Program’ for the children with visual and additional disabilities in Mumbai. Meena Nikam, Director, A B Foundation says, “A B Foundation’s project had started years ago out of passion for special needs children and families; today it is in need of enhanced vision, structured managerial approach and implementation of ideas and success stories of other NGOs with Atma have inspire us to take this step forward. This is exactly why we have joined the Accelerator Program at Atma.”
The names of the NGOs selected for the Atma Accelerator Program ‘Cohort 2015’ are Urja, Human Pride Trust, Art Room Foundation and Karunya Trust.
The names of the NGOs selected for the Atma Accelerator Program ‘Special- Ed Cohort 2015’ are A B Foundation and Gharkul.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
