Educate street children in rural India

When our Snehalaya English Medium School formed in 2010 to get our slum children and children from our long term care centre simply into ANY form of primary education, we didn't know how things would shape up, we didn't even have a school building or more then one teacher.  

Now four years on we are redefiining our goals and believe The Power of Play is vital to our children’s development harnessing their resiliance into empowerment and allowing their potential to be leaders for social change to emerge.  

We are so grateful to be connected to four amazing educational institutions here in Maharashtra and in the UK and partnered with two great charities.  We also have numerous kind benefactors offering donations in kind to build our resource library.  We have not only proved we just may be able to offer a brighter future for our children, but that this is something we could even strive at.  Thank you for staying with us in these formative years.

This year a great many partnerships were formed:

 -Over 3500 books were added to our library from Cathedral & John Connon Infant School, Mumbai & Give A Little Shop, UK and The Idea Foundation, Pune.

  -Wellandpark Academy, UK secured a third year of British Council ‘Connecting Classrooms’ funding allowing both UK and our our teachers to run exchange programmes with great opportunities for our teachers & children to learn about their cultural, economic differences along with realizing the similarities children share. 

-Toybank is an amazing charity in Mumbai that believes play can give back the right to childhood and we are thrilled to be involved in implementing a toy library for our 6 slum districts and at our school. In our communities were possession discipline is low and toys are in their scarcity this invigilated toy library is such an egalitarian and sustainable approach to gifting children what we all remember most from our own. The abandonment and exploration of play!

 -Leeds Rag (Raise & Give Society) not only raised a substantial donation to be used across our education projects, their group of 12 volunteers who visited for 2 weeks in March ran excellent workshops with our school creating beautiful solar system posters titled ‘You Are A Child of The Universe’ a thing of powerful resonance and beauty making our children feel included and counted.

Thank you for your on going support.  We hope you feel it is being spent well and we welcome your comments and suggestions.  Please feel free to Kathleen Smith: give@snehalaya.org

Please think about making a regular donation to this or one of our other 3 other projects.  Even a small regular donation of just £5 a month means over the year you will cover a qualified teachers salary for an entire month.

FARM, ADOPT, EDUCATE, RESCUE

Links:

• Snehalaya School (before we got our New School Building)