Apologies for late posting and congrats for our registration
Hi all,
Me and prasad went to Navnirmiti, an ngo working for the education of slum children, to know how do they work and to get some guidance to our nascent Pankhudi. i’m trying to summarize our conversation considering our points of interest.
Navnirmity was established in 1997 and now working for UNICEF/govt of India project at state levels, in theses projects they teach there methodology of teaching to the staff who Will train primary school and other teachers.
These people have developed there own procedure of teaching and is has got a huge success, they are manly focused on education of maths and trying to develop there own procedure of teaching for science.
They are around 25 in numbers but dedicated ones, some already have left the jobs including the promoter, promoter is from iitb. They do have 4 major units but there is no specific division some times all have to do the same task in case of requirements.
Production Unit—> it takes care for production of plastic, intelligent and value added toys, which is made by women in slum areas whose husbands do not have any job. Toys are developed and designed by RnD section in navnirmiti. The toys are mainly dealing with maths and astronomical phenomenon like solar spec ts to see
solar eclipse.
RnD unit—> deals with development of methodologies for teaching they also develope toys to be soled out for there encome. RnD is done by well experienced people who do have sufficient experience in teaching in slum areas.
Teaching unit—>it done by a group of people.These people do have there own timetable they know what should be the syllabus and how to teach ; for this consistency in classes is required.
Marketing unit—>they sell value added toys to schools, door to door and in local fates etc. by this generate enough monetary support to run there organization. They refuse to take donations especially from abroad because more money makes a man luxury lover and this is the thing to be avoided in such organizations. They already have supplied solar spects to USA at the same price they use to sell in India.
They do have enough contacts and they have found that word of mouth is the best medium to get volunteers in slums as well as out side the slumarea. They have not done any poster campaign, tv, radio, newspaper publicity.
Suggestions to us—> by Navnirmity ofcourse
1. They are ready to tell lots of area but we are new so it is better to get experience (at least 6 months) in nearby slumarea without exhausting ourselves.
They’ve suggested Kanjurmarg is the best for us, there are requirements of teachers and other organizations (Khushi), working there, are unable to fulfill the demand.
2. Without having jumped blindly we should first collaborate with some other, already working, organizations it will increase our contacts/accesses and will give help to understand the nature of work/problem. There is an organization Khushi (We’ve had a talk with them also) working for slum children and they do have lack of teachers. We can collaborate with them. and they are ready for arranging Saturday and Sunday classes for us. It definitely will increase our regularity of visit.
Khushi is also involved in arranging ’summer camps for creativity’ with Navnirmity.
3. There is huge requirement of groups like us, if we start without having any plan and any prior understanding of the root problem, people will show immediate response but later on they will disappear and no one will come to our classes because they will
not getting the things for which they had come for. Exactly the same thing happened with Khushi
but they are now surviving with the help of Navnirmity.
In my opinion Collaboration with Khushi is the best option for us as well as for Khushi
and it will be in favour of slum education.
This mail has been written in different parts of time (busy with project work..) so you may face problems in getting the exact, plz mail me or phone me at 09867722626
Regards,
Saumitra
09867722626