Education for 100 street children in India

As the second wave continues in India, Ashraya perseveres to undertake precautionary measures to safeguard our communities. After a brief reopening in May, schools have been shut down again to mitigate the spread of the virus and Ashraya resumed online classes. With the Ashraya academic year 2020-21 coming to an end in April after an entire year of remote learning, it was a successful year in hindsight for Ashraya as we battled food insecurity, financial crisis and risk of school dropouts. The entire year was an targeted effort at enhancing experiential, practical- based learning through curated curriculums and teaching aids designed at focusing on children’s interests and skills. Through increasing access to digital and remote learning, our pilot program (which was launched in 2019) to ensure that dropout children were retained in formal education, was a case study for success as all the reviously dropped out students, graduated their 10^th grade successfully! Another achievement was a 100% pass out of children in the 10^th and 12^th grade this year. With all these significant milestones, Ashraya ended the academic year by conducting online hobby classes for children in the month of May. 

The hobby classes were an exciting mix of different art, craft, language activities and workshops through a meticulously decided schedule with volunteers. Each grade was given different activities to participate in, and at the end of the month the children presented the knowledge that they had gathered during the hobby classes. This was the very first time that there was extensive volunteer engagement with different individuals and volunteers at Ashraya remotely. The volunteers conducted daily sessions on language (Basic German and French), art (via the Artsee Hope), craft (via the Leaders of Tomorrow), dance workshops, storytelling (via the Turning Pages) and poetry (via the Bullock Cart Poetry). The children also delved into informal learning through their teachers on various different topics like importance of vaccinations, importance of language, disaster management, festivals, environmental sustainability, healthy practices, origami etc. Higher grade students with the facilitation of the computer teacher, learnt the art of video editing and creating, where they made engaging videos on various themes. They also made a presentation video of other students hobby classes work in order to help showcase their work. At the end of the month, each teacher presented the work done by children in their grade during the hobby classes in front of the entire team. It was an enriching experience, and each grade had a lot of information that was shared and absorbed by their respective students. The children thoroughly enjoyed these activities and there was a 75% turnout for at least 60 hours of classes for each child. An important accomplishment was the immersion of some of the volunteering groups (The Artsee Hope, Turning Pages, Bullock Cart Poetry) into the education curriculum at Ashraya to increase outreach of extra-curriculars to more children. The children thoroughly enjoyed this form of learning and are looking forward to more such activities in the coming semester, now as a part of their regularized curriculum. It was the perfect way to end the challenging and rewarding academic year before ushering in the new one!