Education for 100 street children in India

The last two months have been busy ones at Ashraya with festival fun and hobby classes for the ECCE children. This October saw the formal launch of of our Creative Leadership Programme. For the very first time Ashraya decided to address the issue of vulnerable, at-risk youth who are school drop-outs and channel their creative energies constructively. To commence this work Ashraya began to work on an Open School model to ensure that the drop-out children receive adequate life skill and employability training. Ashraya then collaborated with their team of psychologists and teachers and conducted meetings with the donor/stakeholder who was keen on discussing various ways of addressing vulnerable child dropouts. Along with this, on the side, there was consistent peer tutoring and counselling for children and their families.

 The Creative Leadership Program aims at bringing constructive change in children with behavioural issues and  children who are at risk of dropping out through transformative leadership training. Occasionally, children from the community dropout from school due to lack of motivation to study, delinquency or academic pressure and not being able to cope with it.  Instead of pressuring them to join formal education against their wishes, Ashraya decided to adopt a new strategy to engage such children. The project includes mentoring, remedial education, therapeutic session, counselling of parents to increase learning retention and employability. It consists of three phases:

1) The open schooling (learning and retention), 

2) Life skills and community involvement, 

3) Vocational skill development.

An inauguration was held to commemorate the launch which had consultants and experts from education and mental health fields who  were willing to contribute resources to launch the programme. They were very excited and enthusiastic to contribute to the programme by discussing the pros and cons of the model, challenges regarding availability of resources and how to address them, and ways in which we could strengthen and streamline the model and inculcate in into the formal curriculum at Ashraya. 

The major learning from this for Ashraya was that collaboration with other stakeholders/peers is a necessity to tap into resources. Ashraya will strive to address gaps in their existing programme by constantly approaching experts in the field to consult on upcoming projects for resource mobilisation and allocation. We aim to collaborate with more organisations for resources, capacity building and knowledge dissemination. 

Ashraya has discovered a new space where they have started working with children by teaching them life skills, mathematics and habit formation and counselling them. The programme has been on-going since October and has shown massive promise in terms of holistic reformation of the child’s emotional and psycho-social behaviour. The children have shown improvement in learning, retention, increased motivation, independence and employability under the guidance of the programme. The children have taken to the programme, attend classes and therapy regularly and are now looking forward to their bright future prospects!