Give GIRLS in India a CHANCE at life

Dear Donor,

Hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy!!

Mentioning below some of the key highlights of our work between April and August 21.

Team Change Leaders Task Force formed in 35 gram panchayats of Haryana:                                                                                

In the second wave, Covid19 reached to villages and impacted lives and livelihoods. There was lack of appropriate information, resources in the rural area and myths dominated the population, creating barrier in proactively dealing with symptoms and discouraging masses from going for testing and vaccination. Breakthrough along with its regular work, helped the communities in best possible ways in terms of discussion on well-being and connecting to the available verified resource. This was the time of prioritizing lifesaving initiatives, so Breakthrough formed Covid Relief Task Force at different levels. In Haryana, with the help of Team Change Leaders, we formed Covid Task Force at Gram Panchayats level, engaging youth, influencers and different stakeholders. Objective of taskforce was to make communities aware about Covid related information, physical distancing, double masking, myth busting on testing and vaccination. Task force groups also aims to ensure supplies of essentials through networking and connect with different emergency needs through verified resources with the help of Breakthrough state teams.  Till now, task force groups are formed in 35 gram panchayats engaging approximately 1400 community members, youth, stakeholders like frontline workers and teachers. TCL task force members are also mobilizing resources from PRIs. Team Change Leaders in Jhajjar district managed to mobilize 3000 masks and 600 soaps with the help of a local organization NIFA and distributed to workers in 10 brick kiln in the district and one the Team Change Leader able to leverage 1000 sanitary pads through networking with District Legal Service Authority Jhajjar district.  Breakthrough team members are facing challenges in visiting field due to the second wave, team change leaders emerged as hope and forming these task force at village level, we are planning to extend these task force group in more gram panchayats.

Breakthrough team and Team Change Leaders joined SMCs in 31 schools

School Management Committees (SMC’s) build a critical bridge between the community and the school, playing the additional role of providing oversight in schools to ensure all basic requirements of the schools are being met as per the Right to Education Guidelines 2009. SMCs are by vision not just limited to ensuring minimum requirements are met, but can also create enabling conditions to bring stakeholders together towards achieving an effective School Development Plan. To facilitate and empower SMCs to carry out their responsibilities in an effective manner, there is a need to build the capacity of SMC members and to make them aware of their roles, responsibilities and duties to further the cause of quality education. In the last days, SMCs are revived in all the schools of Haryana. In the Breakthrough intervention area-our field team members and some of TCLs were also invited be became part of SMC as a member and now we are part of SMCs in schools of 31 gram panchayats. Breakthrough is playing a facilitator role towards strengthening SMCs by building the capacity of SMC members. We are excited and also hopeful that our young team change leaders who became part of SMCs also became a bridge to voice the adolescent concerns and overall infrastructure of school and education in the SMCs.

School adopts Dakhal Do messaging by wall writing

Dakhal Do is a campaign organised by breakthrough India, talking about bystander intervention. The purpose of the campaign is the focus on how people, despite either witnessing or acknowledging the presence of violence against women, walk away or choose to ignore the problem arguing that it “isn’t their problem.” During our community mobilization events this year on Dakhal Do theme and our conversation with teachers and principals in schools’ level teachers training on Dakhal Do to introduce the campaign as intervention in not just violence but the discriminatory norms that we as society practice in general. Building non-discriminatory village and school is part of our work as gram panchayat level advocacy and to encourage various stakeholders to take it up.

Machhrauli is an intervention village since 2018 and Govt. Senior Secondary school we work in is situated on main Rewari Highway. Principal of this school is very cooperative and values Breakthrough’s work and every initiative. During this teachers training, when we were talking about the Dakhal Campaign and we asked Principal that how can you contribute to take the campaign forward. Principal said that if we provide some messaging about the campaign, they can amplify that through wall writing, which they are planning in upcoming months.

After this, our field team members Meena and Sunita shared messaging with him which along with the good school messaging that was adopted in wall writing in Karnal earlier as reference. Every time our team interacted with the Principal they used to follow up on this. Finally wall writing using Dakhal Do message (see picture-1) in schools was completed along with the wall writing on good school (2^nd picture). After 2^nd wave, when our team visited the schools in the month on July, we found these amazing wall writing on our walls of the school that people entering in the school and crossing from the highway can see. Wall writing here becomes very important as it targets huge audiences as Machhrauli is a big village and adolescents from the 12 nearby villages come to this school, so the parents become the audience of these wall writing.

This all work is happening because of support of DONORS like YOU. We would request you to continue your support and if possible recommend our project to like-minded people.

 

With Hope and Gratitude,

Aman Chhabra.