Aug09
AID Gurgaon took a lot of initiatives and managed quite a few activities to closure in last quarter. Here are the updates:
Corporate Collaboration
AID–
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
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 from AID-Atlanta. Rohit Gupta (McAfee) took over this task voluntarily
and has submitted the report, which was posted on website also. He is working to
develop a model which is easy, simple and credible. In between , 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
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 Literacy
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..
Sewing classes were started at Unnati in July 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 quarter 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 quarter 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
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
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
|
Volunteer |
Visit frequency –Roles |
|
Dilip Kumar (Comverse)
|
Regular-Cordinates Unnati Project and
Nutrition Programme. |
|
Shankar Kumar (Hero Honda)
|
Intermittent –On Community Connect and
Events |
|
Anirban Mudi ( |
Regular- Remotely works on Web
Cordination |
|
Bittu (Construction Suprivisor) |
Intermittent –Out Reach Efforts and |
|
Aashish Kumar (Maruti Suzuki) |
Regular –at Unnati ,conducts Dance
clases |
|
Robyn (International Volunteer) |
Regular –On Tuesdays –Executes Art Plan |
|
Sukrit Chopra (HR -Consultant) |
Intermittant |
|
Puneet Sharma
(Aricent Technolgies) |
Regular-Remotely handles the web
cordination and the Financials of AID –Gurgaon. |
|
Anshul Sachdev
(AT Karney) |
Offline -Due to Personal Reasons |
|
Munish Duvedi
(Quintiles Transnational Corp.) |
Regular-Cordinator AID –Gurgaon |
