Give Children Wings to their Dreams

Dear Codreamers,

We are excited to share with you the journey of Dream A Dream so far. We have launched second Dream Connect Center in KR Puram, Bangalore to reach out 2000 more young people of vulnerable backgrounds.

With this report I would want to share with you a few highlights so far and the story of Ashwini (name changed), from the words of our Life Skills Facilitator, Shivu

Meet Ashwini studying in 7^th Standard and has been part of our Dream life skills programmes since the start of this year.

The Challenge: Academically, she is an average student but highly energetic in the classroom, is a good dancer and also involves herself in sports.

During the observation, it was found that she often teases boys, and hits them as well as uses abusive words towards them. But when the life skill sessions are happening, she appears to be quiet as well as shy but her energy goes up immensely, if there is an action song or games happening during the session. But facilitator found her arguing with her class mates and using bad words, if she was asked to do something. She feels she is right and rest of them is wrong. This resulted in unwanted fights in classroom.

The Change: During the session facilitator started to give her some responsibilities. At the beginning, he asked her to do an action song of the main activity which she liked to conduct. Later gave responsibilities like distribution of materials that helped her to have at least an eye to eye contact with everyone and she slowly started to recognize everyone. It took almost a month to see some changes in her.

Facilitator was very happy to hear from her class teachers and friends’ feedback about her that she has become very active in all class room activities, raises hands to answer questions and takes quick responsibilities at class. She is the one who takes care of 1-3^rd standard students in absence of teachers. She started accepting other students and thus everybody accepts her too.

Her friends said that they were scared to talk to Ashwini in the beginning and now it is different, they love her.

The Dream Power:  Facilitators are the key person of Dream A Dream programmes. They create platforms to the young people of our programme to come out from their challenges.

Organization and Programme Updates and Highlights:

• Received Educasport World Forum Award for ‘New Skills of Sports Instructions’ at Paris.
• Organised ‘Soiree de Smiles’ – Dream A Dream’s first exclusive fundraising evening as part of Unlock Smiles (www.unlocksmiles.com) Campaign
• A visit by Goals for Girls from USA. Organized a coaching clinic and friendly tournament involving 42 girls from Dream A Dream and 20 girls from Goals for Girls team.
• Participating in Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon 2014 on January 19^th 2014. 16 people are running supporting Dream A Dream.
• Successfully facilitated a large scale volunteering workshop for close to 150 representatives from NGOs and CSR units of companies at the IBM Corporate Service Corps conference in Bangalore. Engaged 5001 young people through our life skills programmes. We are currently at 100% of our target of directly impacting 5000 young people.
• A total of 2355 boys and 2646 girls are participating in our core Life Skills Programmes
• 36 Life Skills facilitators trained to deliver the curriculum based sessions.

• Engaged 1795 young people in various skill development and career development courses in the Dream Connect program
• Job placements provided for 17 Dream Connect graduates through Last Mile Support Programme
• As part of the ‘Kalarava’ initiative, 111 graduates were engaged in new learning exposures
• 3 Dream Connect graduates were offered internship opportunities at Dream Connect Center Koramangala and have been engaged in outreach and data entry work.
• Engaged 407 teachers/ NGO workers through our Teacher Development Programme
• Completed 2 mentor training cycle and trained 35 adults.
• Established 35 new mentor and mentee relationships.
• Total 135 volunteering hours spent to mentoring programme
• Engaged 1,591 volunteers clocking 16,716 hours.