NGO initiative to distribute school kits gets bigger
NGO initiative to distribute school kits gets bigger
NGO initiative to distribute school kits gets bigger
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
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Pune: It has been three years since a group of youth came together with the intent of ‘connecting India to Bharat’. Simply put they wanted to connect the corporate India to NGOs that work at the grassroot level, and Seva Sahayog, as the group is called, does exactly this. “We get two communities together on one platform where the corporates can financially help the fund-starved NGOs,” says Shailesh Ghatpande, a member of Seva Sahyog.
From among its varied activities, the school kit programme has received the best response from denizens, especially IT professionals. “Though we had distributed school kits in 2007, but it was on a much smaller scale. We realised that to reach out to more children, the activity needs to be carried out on a much larger scale. We then conducted a survey to find out the number of children who really need such kits,” Ghatpande explains, adding that the survey results really surprised them. “Over 50,000 students in the city needed such kits,” he adds.
“Next year, we approached corporates in the city and made the kit-collection programme a part of their corporate social responsibility activity wherein employees can sponsor one such kit at only Rs 200. In fact, some of our volunteers also spread the word at their workplaces,” Ghatpande says.
The kit, comprising of about 10 notebooks - as per the class requirements, a pencil or a geometry box and a school bag actually cost anything between Rs 280 to Rs 325 in the market. “But we spoke to the manufacturers and they agreed to sell it at a lower price,” he adds.
Last year, the NGO distributed these kits to over 3,000 students through various NGOs working in the field of education like Nihar, Swaroop Wardhinee and Surajya Prakalp, among others.
“This year we plan to distribute about 10,000 kits through the same NGOs. It has been two weeks since we launched the drive and we have another two weeks before the next academic year begins,” says Ghatpande, adding that they have already crossed the halfway mark to 10,000 and hope to collect the remaining by June 7. The group has been assembling these kits every Sunday for the past two weeks.
“The happiness that a child experiences on getting new things on the first day of school is incomparable and is something that all of us have experienced. It is something that even the underprivileged should experience and hence our drive,” says Ghatpande.
(Seva Sahayog can be contacted on 020- 24433606.)
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