By Priya Shankar | Co-Founder, Adolescent Health Champion
Dear Adolescent Health Champion,
We wish you a very happy and healthy new year in 2024! Thank you for your ongoing support!
We start this new year together by remembering and honoring our late co-founder and President, Ricky Rajesh Sharma, his immense contributions to furthering adolescent health in rural India, and his vision to support the health and well-being of the 240 million (24-crore) adolescents of India and across the globe. Ricky was on his way to Lunkaransar, Rajasthan to train a cadre of mental health peer educators when he passed away in July 2023. His vision and mission was to bring forth conversations and remove stigma in places with the least support for mental health, gender, and overall adolescent well-being.
We are tremendously proud to share that, despite facing incredible sadness after Ricky’s passing, Adolescent Health Champions has successfully met its commitments and is running our adolescent health and mental health-focused peer health interventions in Rajasthan and Jharkhand government schools for the academic year 2023-2024!
In Jharkhand, India, AHC is working in 105 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) schools across 9 districts, training 2,000+ adolescent girls as peer educators or Champions who are providing critical adolescent health education to about 12,600 adolescent girls in rural Jharkhand in the 2023-24 academic year. In Rajasthan, India, our adolescent mental health peer education intervention is currently live in 25 rural government schools in the Lunkaransar block of Bikaner district, where we are training 240 peer educators or Champions to lead sessions on mental health with 3,000 adolescents. We are grateful for your generous support which has helped us make this possible!
As we wrap up the final stage of programming for 2023-2024, our focus is on how AHC can help expand the frontier of adolescent health to more and more adolescents in rural India alongside our partner organizations Urmul Setu Sansthan and Ugam Education Foundation (UEF). Under Ricky’s outstanding leadership and guidance, in 2023 we reached 130 rural schools and supported close to 15,600 adolescents. In 2024, we want to stay true to Ricky’s vision and continue expanding our existing partnerships to reach another 160 rural schools and support another 19,000 adolescents in Jharkhand and Rajasthan.
20th January is a special date as it is Ricky’s birthday. On the 20th of January 2024 and throughout the entire 2024, we aim to raise $250,000 in honor of Ricky’s commitment and contributions to creating a more gender equitable world where every adolescent is holistically healthy, educated, and empowered to pursue their goals and talents.
Please consider donating today. Your contributions, help us keep Ricky’s dreams alive by growing our adolescent-led health movement to reach more schools and adolescents than ever before!
With gratitude,
The Adolescent Health Champions team
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