Volunteering Activities

Team Lead at Desire Foundation

We are all familiar with the Right To Education (RTE) Act. Here's Desire Foundation, dedicated to one of its sections — Section 12(1)(c). 'All specified category or private schools must reserve 25% of their seats for children belonging to EWS from the neighbourhood and provide them admission from Class I onwards', it states. This organization, which started its operations in the year 2014 in Bhubaneswar, has multiple projects and ventures going on. I started here as a Sales Intern on 2016 and learnt a lot of things over the years.

Adhyayan

As part of this project, we surveyed over 500 families to collect data of children belonging to the EWS. We approached private schools to admit the eligible kids for free education. A Master database has been prepared where we connect schools, slums and children, all on one platform. We provide them online education and also keep a track on their progress. We are constantly monitoring performances and hardships faced by the kids who were admitted to school under Adhyayan previously. We have admitted more than 300 kids till now.

Liter of Light

On 25th August, in Bhubaneswar, we carried out a global project in collaboration with Mr. Illac Diaz (founder of Liter of Light), Mr. Panjak Dixit and a few delegates from UAE. Along with Liter of Light, we prepared solar lanterns and solar lamps. The initiative was focused on being eco-friendly and thus most parts of the street lights were taken from waste material. Instead of metal rods, bamboo was used to install those lights. Instead of glass bottles, plastic bottles were used for lighting. Study lamps were also given to children of the village keeping in mind their ease of study at night. We also installed three automatic solar lights in the ward.

10000 copies sold

You write and help them write is our motto. We sold close to 10000 copies in and around Bhubaneswar's colleges and the profits went to serving the kids. We also donated some of the copies to the kids admitted to private schools.

Organized donation drives

We organize many donation drives several times a year. These are mostly food donation drives but we also distribute stationary items and clothing. One such event was Treatzza, wherein we took the kids to Pizza Hut.

Collaborations

Collaborated with various other organizations, on events. Some of them were to raise awareness whereas others were fundraisers. These helped us meet new people from the social sectors, who spread the word about RTE.

ThinkZone

May 2017 - Jul 2017

ThinkZone is an award winning social impact startup that enables women entrepreneurs to drive technology-based learning in low-income communities. ThinkZone implements a comprehensive, scale-driven lean model through its ‘school-in-a-box’ solution to deliver quality early childhood and primary-level education programs at less than a dollar a month per child. This is probably the very few times in India where a technology-based pedagogy is built for first-generation learners and for teachers who come from limited education background. I worked as a content research intern.

Project FindiGate

Jan 2017 - Mar 2017

Mega-Learning Carnival organized by OPGC, Odisha as part of Finland-India Collaboration (A CSR Initiative). Conducted surveys to collect and analyze data for Project FINDIGATE (on the field of Humanitarian Technology Development).