Project updates : AID Gurgaon

Corporate Collaboration

AID – NCR took initiative to share a vision with Evalueserve, to mainstream a minimum of 500 underprivileged children in to regular schools. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between Mr Aashish Gupta (Country Head) Evalueserve and Selva on behalf of AID –NCR, whereby EVS had assured volunteers and committed funding to AID projects across NCR region to help achieve the target.

Nutrition Programme

 It started in Disha on the lines of Unnati, and programme is now running on regular basis. Children and Teacher, coordinate among themselves for the smooth running of this programme.

RSEP

All the children admitted under this programme rejoined the school In July .A big setback was Sanayak, who dropped out in between from Pallavan, as per her grandparents he went to his home town in Bihar. Progress of the children is being checked regularly by the volunteers. There have been few challenges with these children, but volunteers are trying to motivate the children their parents and are meeting the teachers in the school for tracing the progress of these children.

Tracking sheet of Progress of Children at Disha

As per the understanding reached between AID - Gurgaon and AID-Atlanta, it was agreed to give a monthly progress tracking sheet of the children at Disha. This was a requirement for the funding assistance for AID-Atlanta. Rohit Gupta (McAfee) took over this task voluntarily and has submitted one report, which was posted on website also. He is working to develop a model which is easy, simple and credible. In between as backup Swati Sinha (Law Student, Final Yr) had volunteered for this task, she is observing this model and is working closely with Rohit for better understanding.

Independence Day Celebrations

I-Day was celebrated with lot of joy, excitement at Disha .Children from both schools gathered at Disha along with volunteers, teachers and few visitors. National Flag was hoisted and National Anthem was sung with pride. There was lot of performance by children which was a great learning for the fellow children and for volunteers also.

Creativity Classes

These classes are run by Robyn, who is one of our International volunteers have been regularly coming on the Tuesdays and have come with a ART PLAN, which shall serve the purpose to guide interested new volunteers to join in these classes .  The plan will be finalized soon and shall be published on the website.

Health Initiative

“If problems are interconnected so shall be the solutions” Team Guragon had a detailed discussion on this aspect and came on the conclusion that apart from Education and Nutrition, child  health should be the component our strategic efforts towards mainstreaming of these children . Further this was felt imperative when few our RSEP  children felt ill and missed their classes for one whole week .We are planning to work out this with some hospitals in Gugaon and would soon come up with a plan on this .

Out Reach Efforts

Bradley Gamage, Sapient-UK Director and Directors of UK Health Services visited AID – Gurgaon projects and were amazed to see the performance of the children and humbleness of our efforts. They had great time at school and amused the children by their magic tricks .We plan to take this association with Sapient to higher levels, for which volunteers are constantly following up. Prachi (Project Aashayien) and me also accompanied to the slum areas where these children live .Ruhi  an international volunteer also helped visitors to show around .

Volunteers have been working regularly to reach more and more corporate for Volunteers, resources and funds for new and existing projects in Gurgaon. As a result few corporate representatives had visited us and have appreciated our efforts and looking forward to work with us. Also some corporate had requested us to give a presentation at their offices.

Volunteers are very excited to start a new project in Gurgaon and have been regularly doing ground surveys and community surveys in different location in Gurgaon. Once team finds some new committed volunteers to manage these projects these will be started with no scope for delays.

Adult Litracy

This program was started with an object to facilitate the Adolescent boys who work throughout the day and are willing to study in the evening and are interested to learn computers. The project is in trouble due to lack of volunteers to monitor it on daily basis and basic infrastructure .We expect to get furniture from AT Karney very soon next month. Also talks are on with another corporate company to get few computers, so that this project could be accelerated and expanded. Also lack of proper modules and an experienced teacher is major challenge faced by this programme. We are still open to NAME this project..

Skill Building Programme for Girls

Sewing classes were started at Unnati a month back by Literacy India .As of now there are Six sewing machines and 12 adolescent girls .The response have been very good and there is very good scope to scale this programme.

Community Connect

Among Gurgaon AIDers it’s popularly known as “Basti Visit “. This is being done on regular basis on Sunday evenings. Objective of these visits are constantly re-discovered and achieved by volunteers.

Purpose of these visits is:

·         To get connected with the community.

·         Win their confidence 

·         motivate them to send there children to school

·         make them realize the importance of education

Recently we had few international volunteers joining us on these visits.

 IT Updates

It was a grueling month for the IT team as we did a lot of fine tuning of our website and had a lot of things to report to our well wishers :-)

For the past few months, we have been trying hard to make our website more user friendly and informative.

Some key updates are:

> AID Gurgaon volunteer opportunities were posted on various web classifieds. 

> Volunteer experiences, project updates, pictures, slideshows and much more were posted on AID Gurgaon website regularly. 

> New features like facebook fan box, volunteer registration link, contact us form, projects map and tell a friend have been added.

> Updates were posted on social media like orkut, facebook, twitter and various other community portals to create mass awareness about our work. 

> Google analytics has been very helpful in understanding the shortcomings of our website and we have tried to rectify them as and when time permitted.

As a result of our online efforts, we have got a decent number of volunteer requests via internet in spite of substantial downtime of AID Gurgaon website due to server problems. 

We hope to keep all our well wishers informed about our work regularly in the future as well, so please keep visiting our website (http://gurgaon.aidindia.org). 

Our Web coordinators Anirban, Puneet and Sanchit are never short of ideas, and are passionate to volunteer in this way. They infact set a model in volunteering and show the flexibility of options to volunteer with AID. Just one need to donate is his/her little time!

New Volunteers updates!

This month good number of volunteers came forward and showing there commitment and desire to make this society more inclusive and share this vision with us.

However it was observed that its something lacking on our part that we are not able to retain these volunteers .We are have initiated a volunteer management plan where we will decide the proper volunteering modules which can give an ease to volunteering considering the grueling work pressure on the volunteers working with corporate in Gurgaon. Also we strongly feel personal commitments also should not suffer on weekends, so this way we need some innovative to work out with such volunteers.

Following are the new volunteers:-

Dileep:

Works with Evalueserve as Research Associate and has been working with fellow AIDers on all Saturdays and Community Connect on Sundays. He is actively participating in discussion with community people and closely monitoring the Adult literacy programme. He keep on motivating adolescent and adult men working in his company and business centre, who work as guards, housekeeping, and office boys to add value to there work by acquiring technical skills . 

Gauri Mathur

A Psychology student studying in Noida she volunteered during her summer vacations at Unnati. She have been working on the  English literacy of children  and worked very hard with full commitment during her vacations .She now comes intermittently as most of the time she is in hostel in Noida.

Rohit Gupta

An Engineer by profession he works with McAfee as a Software Engineer.

Rohit enjoys the analytical work in his profession and choose the similar volunteering activity in AID Gurgaon also.

He volunteers every Saturday at Disha, where he works to track and analyze the progress of the children.

Rohit feels that "Educating a child today is equivalent to uplifting a full family in the next generation."

During one his visits Rohit shares “I learned that a right blend or resources and guidance can take these children to new heights. I learned that it’s important to be in the right place at the right time. If we can ensure this synchronization for these children, they will fly on their own. They gave mementos to cherish of my own past, a food for thought to reorganize my relationships and the motivation to come again. I offered them a bird and they fetched for me two from the bush!!  “

Smita Singla

An Engineer by profession and works with Floor Denial. Smita is very passionate about seeing the change around her…..positively.

She have been accompanying on Community Connect and have is working to play an active role in Publication team of Gurgaon.

She feels “Every single moment I spent with those children and their parents was an experience for me. I could see a twinkle, a joy in their eyes. They felt wanted and cared for. I thanked God for providing me with an opportunity to do my bit for these disadvantaged angel-like souls. We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own surroundings, our own cities to remedy this kind of poverty….The combined efforts of millions of concerned citizens could do wonders to help the impoverished.”

Swati Sinha

A final year Law student in Delhi she lives in Gurgaon. Swati has been volunteering since June. She bring along with her a charm that engages all children in Unnati , to such a level that children forget all other voluntees present there. She prepared children on song “Ek din mitjaya maati key mol, jagg mein rehjayenge pyare tere bol” which inspires not only children but we volunteers also. She aspires to work with UNICEF later in her career.

Aastha Chalana

An Engineer by profession she works as Research Associate with Evaluserve.

 Aastha joined AID through the CSR cell of Evaluserve and had actively participated in the Independence Day celibrations. She is very keen to work on Out Reach Endeavour’s of AID_Gurgaon and looks forwards to work on it.

Recently she posted her experiences in the “Volunteer speak “on website where she says

As they say, life is too short to do all. But Sangarsh Seva Nirman can anyways be carried through out one’s life. In order to work on these lines I decided to join hands with AID Gurgaon for this noble cause. The idea of getting involved in the AID team was to interact with the potential population (young children) who is directly benefited through it.

In this age of neck to neck competition, mad race of earning money, fame and respect. I always used to wonder if there are some people who actually think anything over and above themselves. But after meeting the team my views got transformed. I met some great people, who if not more is as enthusiastic as I am. I was more than surprised to see the spirit of the members and their way to interpret things. I came to believe that there is no dearth of good people around us, the art to have an eye to see them, spot them. As every one of us is either studying or works to earn our own living, but after joining the team I realized something very special. It is that we have not come to this mother earth just to do any job, but we have come here to provide our services to the society. Everyone in the team contributes to the maximum of his/her capacity. The level of cooperation is very mature among the mates.

According to me, when we help people or work for them, we in turn help ourselves. The rewards we get are beyond obvious and tangible. We develop as a person and a human being. So according to me my contribution to society is more my own progress and happiness. I shall keep my up all my sincere efforts to work the max I can.

 Varun Jain

An Engineer by profession works with an overseas commodity trading firm.

He joined us first time on ORM and is willing to work with publication team and modules development team of Gurgaon.

Prateek Vijayvergia

Software Engineer by profession and working with Royal Bank of Scotland in Gurgaon.

Prateek while sharing his first view at AID-Gurgaon that involved community visit was a mixed-bag. He felt sad to see that so many people live without proper shelter (forget electricity) in such conditions but at the same time he was pleased and motivated to find that even in those small basti's (slum-dwelling houses) the children were so eager to learn.

He very keen to work in educating chlidren and look forward to work on it.

Other Volunteers of AID –Gurgaon

Submitted by:-

Munish Duvedi

On Behalf of AID-Gurgaon Team.

Project Name : Unnati (AID Gurgaon)

Project Location : Jharsa Village, Near Exit-9, NH-8

Regular Class timings : 0900 - 1300

Regular volunteers :  Anshul, Dilip, Shankar, Puneet

New volunteers this month :  Nidhi, Aashish, Kunal, Tejeswar

Contact Information :

Puneet - 9811621209

Asnhul - 9873469546

Dilip  - 9999076708

Shankar- 9310002440

Activity Updates :

15th August celebration

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On my way to Unnati school on the morning of Independence day, I had tuned into All India Radio and was listening to the Prime Minister's speech at Red Fort. Once the speech was concluded, there was a loud and clear "Jai Hind" from tens of thousands of school children present on the occasion. I just hoped that we could experience something similar to that at Unnati.

Although the numbers were not comparable, the spirit most certainly was. We had asked the children to reach Unnati at 0830hrs. As we reached there around 8 'o clock to set things up, we were surprised to see the children already there. That was just the kind of boost we needed as the day before, it was raining cats and dogs and we were more than worried about the participation from the children.

We started off with the flag hoisting ceremony which was followed up with the singing of The National Anthem. Four small kids standing besides the tricolour and reciting poems with patriotic lyrics of the like "Hum bhi ladne jaenge, seene pe goli khaenge" was quite a site.

We then moved onto drawing competition and as there were around 50 kids, we divided them into two batches. They were asked to draw anything they were comfortable in but were told about the theme of the day as well. Concurrently, there was a "Ball in basket" game which the kids enjoyed the most. We divided the kids into four groups of around 12 each and got two winners from each group. There were occasions when kids from the village (not from our school) were pleading us to let them participate. Once we were through with all the four groups, we decided to let them have a go at the basket as well.

The drawing competition was won as on the last Republic day by the sister-brother duo of Tara and Vinod. There were consolation prizes for second and third positions as well. Eight prizes for four groups of Ball-in-basket competition were distributed. Besides, there were two prizes for the best academic performance and two for the best attendance - one from each boys and girls.

Last but not the least, there was a common gift for Sumanji and Devendraji for their invaluable contribution towards running the school.

We concluded the event by distributing sweets to everyone and the smiles on the faces of the kids were sweeter than the sweets and as bright as the 62nd Independence day.

Occasions like these are rare but once you experience them, they stay with you for a lifetime!

Jai Hind!

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Donated cloth/shoes/toys distribution

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one of our old volunteers Anupama had a cloth collection drive at her community. She collected lots of clothes, shoes and toys for the kids and we co-ordinated to distribute the same to kids at Unnati. It sure was a delightfull sight to see them so happy.

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Regular basti visits:

                -identified new kids Sakeena and Aarti

                -Tracking Tara/Vinod for the school test [Vivek high school] which start at 15th Sep.

Events planned in next month :

-Health check up activity for Unnati school kids.

-explore possibility of new school in sec-46