Help create a Billion Literates!

As one academic year draws to a close, we at OBLF are busy planning ahead for the next one. Year before last we expanded our operations by 150% - from covering 1000 rural kids to 2500! But last year we could increase our impact only marginally, to cover about 3000 children. This was not due to a lack of intention, but because we hit a bottleneck in getting more rural ladies to join our program as Coordinators, to teach the kids we serve.

During the site visit of the Global Giving representative Adam Cross of UK, we had in-depth discussions on all aspects of our operations. Arising out of that, we had a very focused meeting with our Senior Coordinators (rural ladies who have been with us for over 6 years), our Program Supervisors, two of our Trustees, along with our Program Manager and Director, to chalk out a plan to get more rural ladies to join our program.

The excellent ideas that came from our Senior Coordinators really amazed us and consequently, we got connected to the President of the local women’s group (Stree Shakti) in the area, the President of the Government school Teachers’ Association of that local area, the local cable operator who telecasts all local events and took many other small steps, which led to almost 30 new ladies joining our program.

Our current weekly training program is conducted in 3 different batches at the Lakshmisagara government school, where they have been kind enough to give us 2 rooms for the purpose. However, with the coming of the new ladies, these rooms were not adequate for us. We therefore started training the two new batches at two different training centres – one in another government school (thanks to our new local contacts), and another at the house of our Lead Coordinator Swapna. Two of our Senior Coordinators started training the new batches till such time we got two new excellent volunteers – Simi and Anahita.

Swapna has been kind enough to let us put up a portable pre-fabricated structure on her terrace, which is now being readied as our new Training Room. We appreciate Swapna’s loyalty and commitment to OBLF.