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Next Goals : Starting a school and Expanding Padbank

 

With Play School already in place, Starting a primary school:

 

The long term goal of Shuruaat remains to build residential schools and provide quality education to under-priveleged children. Education without a conducive and supporting environment does not produce the expected results.A lot of resources, human efforts  and hard-work goes to waste, but most importantly and unfortunately, it is some children who pay the ultimate price and their lives are destroyed.

 

Start the school for Primry students: 

 

Shuruaat’s long term goal is to provide quality Education to children who are being devoid of it. The journey which started on footpath, over the years moved to a single room classroom and now a full fledged first school is operational for the nursery children and we plan to move to next level of Primary school. We wish to see it as a self-sustainable model with support from public via donations.

 

How and why do we want to start a school ?

 

In our journey of the last 5 years we have not only been teaching the children, but we have been learning from them as well. While working with these children, we realised that the most important thing which these children need more than anything is a ‘learning- environment’. We can spend a few hours trying to teach these children, but before and after our class these children spend most of their time on the footpath, at traffic signals or playing around near the slums. It is there where these children are most vulnerable and often fall prey to untoward incidents, or get influenced by anti-social elements. 

 

In order to keep children away from these influences and keep them in a safe environment, we enrolled a lot of children to nearby government schools and in some cases with the help of our benevolent donors to private schools. But, still it is not possible to get all children, specially the young ones to be admitted to school.

 

After due deliberation and discussions we came to the conclusion that the best and success can be achieved by keeping these children in a safe and protected environment of learning, and the best possible way to do that is to have our own school, where these children can learn and be Educated in a formal manner. 

 

We decided to implement this solution in a gradual and phased manner as we understood that starting a school is no mean task and will need a lot of resources.

 

We have done some initial groundwork. 

A building has been rented in a location that is near to the area where these children live, and classrooms have been set up. We have also set up a library and a computer lab for senior students. 

 

Nutrition is an important aspect and essential too. Most of these children come from under-privileged backgrounds and are mal-nutritioned. One of  Shuruaat’s next goals is to provide these nursery children’s nutritious and healthy mid-may meals to ensure proper growth of these children during their most important growing years.

 

Expand the Pad-Bank and make it self-sustainable: 

Currently, Padbank is operational at 3 branches (150 Beneficiaries at each branch).

Spread awareness about Menstrual Hygiene 

 

Few months back team Shuruaat started a campaign on Menstrual Hygiene.

 

Out of about 150 students associated with Shuruaat, more than 80 are girls. A lot of them have reached menstruating age. 

 

Our teachers came to know that the girls do not have access to pads and often use unhygienic practices during menstruation.

 

Shuruaat tried to address this issue by starting an awareness campaign in our classes, where teachers encouraged girl students to talk about Menstrual Hygiene and to not consider it as a taboo.

 

A small pad-bank was started at one of our locations in order to provide easy access to Menstrual pads.

 

The awareness campaign had surprising results and some students came forward and told our team now most women in near by slums ( name the areas from print article ) do not have access Menstrual pads.

We decided to scale up our efforts and provide free pads to women from our neighbouring areas. Any woman needing pads could walk into our center and get them for free.

 

We were not prepared for another surprise. World travelled very fast and in next few days we have had women who walked from as far as 10 km to get free pads as they could not afford one and had been using unhygienic alternatives including rags and clothes.

 

Our team visited these slums and made an assessment about access Menstrual pads and as per their assessment, more than 80% women in these areas do not have access to Menstrual pads and follow unhygienic Menstrual practices.

 

Team Shuruaat has then made a conscious decision to expand our Pandbank service in-order provide free pads to these women. We will also plan to run awareness programs on Menstrual Hygiene for these women.

 

On 02-Oct-2021 Team Shuruaat started a second pad-bank at Shashtri Nagar. On the first days itself about 80 women used the pad-bank to avail the free menstrual pads.

We plan to scale up the free service to cover a larger area and more women, and this goal cannot be achieved by your continuous support and help.

 

We request you to make a contribution to support this goal. You can choose to make a monthly contribution which will help us to continue serving the women on a regular basis.

 

Alternatively you can choose to make a one time contribution to help us purchase a fixed number of Menstruation pads.

 

Details regarding the same can be found on the Donations page.