The U.P ShikshaDaan Yatra begins

8th May 2018

Since July 2017, we have been doing only short trips of nearby districts for ShikshaDaan as we had a lot of unfinished work at Delhi and we were also awaiting our 80G exemption. We got the 80G exemption in Feb 2018 and we immediately did our strategy meeting in March to decide on the way forward. We are excited with our plans and yes they are ambitious. As part of the data collection for the strategy meeting, we realised that U.P has a large number of educational institutions. So we decided to do the important districts in U.P and a couple of districts in Bihar in this month.

We started out from Gurgaon on the 6th of May for Lucknow. We will be here for this week, before moving to Allahabad.

Yesterday, we met with Chris from “Medha”, a potential partner of ours. Medha works with youth from the underprivileged sections of the society and offers them a structured employment skills program. Internship is a part of the program and it helps the trainees find jobs more easily as they get some on-the-job training. While Medha is largely focussed in Lucknow and the nearby districts, they are expanding to Karnal and Meerut. We are keen to evaluate opportunities in those two locations as they are proximate to Delhi NCR. Medha has impacted nearly 5000 lives and that is so impressive !!

In the afternoon we visited “Sarthak” and met with Kshama, Shubhendru, and Manas. Amazing work is being done by Sarthak with 800+ slum children in giving them a chance to do better in life by getting some education. We also met Neha, a beneficiary who has completed her 10th standard and what a positive energy she had. We certainly would like to explore the possibility of working with Sarthak.

Today we went to the Bharatiya Balika Vidyalaya in Hazratganj. One of our potential partner, Project Khel was conducting a life skills session there for the 9th standard girls. Its a government school where two shifts are run and it was opened in 1944. The school has a large area and a big building. We were chatting with the person who was sitting at the gate and he mentioned the fact that the school does need some investment in infrastructure to make it even better. Some musical instruments were needed and he also mentioned toilets that needed to be built or repaired.

Project Khel’s associates conducted a very nice life skills session using the three legged race and the Chinese Whispers game to teach the students about planning and communication. Sheba, Medha and Uttam conducted these games by splitting the girls into two groups. Interestingly Uttam has completed his 10th standard and is an alumni of Project Khel, who now works as a Youth leader with them. He wants to get into the civil services and he seems all set to do that !! A very interesting format of engaging with the students through sports and games and helping them learn life skills. We had met Abhilasha in Gurgaon and were very interested in their approach to social upliftment.

What is very heartening to see in the social sector is the entry of young folks who are well educated and have worked at well paying jobs or are still working somewhere but are engaged in some community development work. It bodes well for the future of our country. All the three NGOs that we met in Lucknow are run by really young people and we felt truly inspired by each one of them.

Looking forward to meeting others in the next few days and also to developing strong partnerships in U.P.