Give Children Wings to their Dreams

After School Life Skills Programme:

In our After School Life Skills Programme, we use creative arts and football as mediums to engage and develop critical life skills among young people between the ages of 8 to 15 years. This programme is an innovation lab where new approaches to life skills development are introduced, demonstrated, documented, evaluated, and fed back into a larger framework for re-imagining learning for young people in the country. To measure the improvements in life skills amongst the young people, we use the Life Skills Assessment Scale (LSAS*).

This year is particularly difficult for the young people and the teachers due to the prevailing lockdown due to the COVID 19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created havoc across the world and the number of positive cases keeps increasing every day. A calamity like COVID-19 brings out the best and worst in a society. The first to get affected are the young people who come from difficult backgrounds. The fast act and response measures from the government to curb the pandemic is making life more difficult for marginalized groups.

Many of our young people’s parents are daily wage workers and many of them are dependent on daily, weekly and bi-weekly income; putting an immense amount of stress on them to buy food and other basic everyday needs. Summer is also the time that many young people use to earn money to save for further education. The battle against COVID-19 has made young people feel more vulnerable than before because they wouldn’t be able to afford school/ college fees.

Some of the highlights for FY2020-21:

The number of Beneficiary enrolled in the programme at the end of August 2020 is 2908, comprising of 1420 boys and 1488 girls.

There are 16 female facilitators and 19 male facilitators to conduct the Life Skills sessions.

We have not been able to conduct the sessions due to the lockdown imposed by the Government due to the COVID 19 outbreak. Therefore, the team has been having virtual session through Whatsapp and Zoom under the reintegration initiative. Till date we have 2908 young people enrolling into the programme which includes 940 young people enrolled under the reintegration initiative.

The Global #Whatif movement

Over the last few months, Suchetha (CEO, Dream a Dream) and Vishal  (Co-founder & Trustee, Dream a Dream) have tried to make sense of everything that has happened / is happening, and specifically its impact on children from marginalized communities. They wrote a series of articles (1,2,3) reflecting on the education system and the insights they were picking up from the ground.

These articles got a great response from the community and people started reaching out with questions on how they can engage and support these reflections. This led to the launch of a Global Movement called #WhatIf. You can read more about it here - https://whatif-global.com/.

The #WhatIf Movement is a community driven initiative with the intention to invite a pause, a moment, a stillness into our being before we can respond to support our children. It is an initiative to explore and discover what could be our most compassionate offer to our children during this pandemic and post when children begin to re-engage with school.

There have been some amazing partners / individuals joining the movement through writing articles, sending across endorsements, creating and sharing resources, engaging with social media and taking the #WhatIf idea to their communities. Since it’s a community driven event, different partners are engaging with it in their own way and driving the thinking.

The overall hope is that the process of reflection and taking a pause will help us change narratives around education and give us a real chance to Reimagine education in a post-COVID world.

We would like to share some of the Stories of the Young people who rose to the occasion to demonstrate high leadership quality, initiative and empathy –

At Dream a Dream, we give all the support a young person needs and more so now. We have formed a team comprising of the Leadership and the programme managers to support young people’s social, emotional and economic needs during these stressful times. We have also formed a team to stay connected and support young people and teachers in our programme. The team answers calls related to awareness and precautions related to COVID-19, give emotional/validation support, advise related to e-learning programme and provide dry ration kits to needy families.

"I am Bhavana 14years old graduate from Pragna Vidyaniketan School currently I am studying in 10th grade. Today I am going to share my lockdown experience with “Dream a Dream”.
I am very happy and to tell that I'm graduate of “Dream a Dream” programme. This lockdown and pandemic doesn't stop me from chasing my dreams and Passion. I’m a dancer and I like to dance in my free time."

In spite of simply being quarantined at home during this lockdown, I continued my dance classes through an online portal. I practice every day and I sent the recordings to my teacher. My teacher encouraged me to come up with my own choreography. I made my own dance steps and I taught the other children in my locality too. This made them feel very happy.

I learnt how to overcome difficulties through the sessions conducted by “Dream a Dream” and I made use of this skill during the lockdown. I participated at *My Home Days* contest and won a certificate. This made me feel proud, I didn't get bored staying at home because I found new form of lifestyle.

Ashraff, 13 year old young person from Raza School. She is bold and wants to learn new things. During the lockdown she was extremely worried about the pandemic situations around her. This made to feel dark and gloomy.

There were lot of problems within her household as regards issues with the police and the Covid situation. This made her depressed. Once the Lockdown was over, she started pursuing her interest in drawing with the help of Dream a dream’s facilitator. The skills she built during the sessions helped her build her inner imagination as she tried to depict her problems through her drawings. She is now working on a magazine. She is eagerly waiting to present it with her team picturizes about the past, present, and the future situations which they wanted to address.

Swetha graduate from football programme who is passionate about learning football; due to the lockdown her coaching came to a halt and she could not practice football in the field.
Swetha was self-determinate, as not to stop training and used you-tube channels to train herself in football. While creating a learning space for herself and for other too. She was able to teach for the children in her community. She not only taught children the football skills but also brought down their anxiety about covid-19 through football.