By Manak Matiyani | Project Leader
Kareena is 13 years old and lives in Sundar Nagar Nursery (SNN), an urban slum community in Nizamuddin Basti of Delhi. Kareena joined The YP Foundation’s Blending Spectrum programme in 2008 as a participant of the Life Skills Education programme. Since then, she has been part of many small interventions in the community and developed herself as a young leader actively supporting YP’s programme.“I was determined to improve the conditions in the community and especially work to provide a better future to its young people but needed a support system”, shares Kareena.
Kareena was particularly concerned about the condition of women and other girls like her in SNN. The community members are mostly migrants from smaller towns and rural areas and their primary source of income is rag-picking. These urban poor live in appalling conditions with substandard housing and poor basic amenities. There are many dark and ignored corners in the community and safety of women and girls is a big concern. So when there was a chance to collaborate with Safeti Pin, a mobile application that crowd sources safety data from various cities around the world, enabling organisations and communities to use it for advocacy and Jagori – an established women’s rights organisation working in Delhi, she enthusiastically took it up.
Leading the initiative, Kareena led a process of collecting data about safety perceptions in the community and creating a report with recommendations for improvement. Using this, Kareena and other youth reached out to the local police and elected representative raising critical questions to demand change like “Why is there an absolute negligence towards poor people’s safety when there can be an entire army of security personnel deployed for a minister’s single visit?”
The initiative has led to improvement in lighting, infrastructure and police patrolling in the area to ensure that young girls can go to school safely and without fear. The Cities for Children report on the safety audit was released at a community event and can be downloaded for reading http://www.theypfoundation.org/cities-for-children/. Several NGO and government representatives attended the event along with the community members and appreciated the youth-led initiative. Kareena now feels confident to connect to these officials and the local young people for community development work in future.”The trainings and workshops conducted by the Blending Spectrum team have helped me develop confidence, life skills, a strong gender perspective and knowledge on several relevant social issues”, says Kareena.
Kareena is leading many such interventions with young people and children in her community and she wants to lead the Blending Spectrum programme in future and work for other vulnerable young people. The Blending Spectrum programme has been running in SNN since 2006 and each year, it provides leadership and learning opportunities for young leaders like Kareena to advance the rights of other people in her community and contribute to positive development. Over the past years, the programme has directly worked with 1271 children and a total of 254 families. The YP Foundation is committed to continue empowering children and young people to become agents of change like Kareena. This won’t be possible without the support of donors like you who’ve helped us come this far. Thank you for supporting our work and continuing to donate to help us advance learning and leadership opportunities for young people from diverse backgrounds.
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By Manak Matiyani | Project Leader
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