Community Initiative Foundation: Many a time you must have seen few children begging at traffic signals. What thought do you get about those children while you are sitting in a car or on a bike and waiting for the signal to turn green? Most of us wish a better life for them, Right? However, the misery of such children doesn’t stay for long in our mind. The moment the signal turns green, we start moving ahead to our destination and by the time we reach our destination we almost forget them.
Although, there are few people who never forget about the painful life of those children and their helplessness and eventually take steps to help them.
Nitin Sharma, Co-founder and director of Community Initiative Foundation who along with his friends once went to celebrate New Year’s eve among children living in the slum area of Manohar Nagar (Delhi). He and his friends enjoyed every moment they spent there. Since then Nitin Sharma and his friends had decided to work for the cause of education, especially for the underprivileged children living in slums of Delhi.
Need of education for Underprivileged
Due to lack of education and extreme poverty, people living in slums are the soft targets of human trafficking gangs. Children from slums are often forced to beg on streets and sometimes they are inflicted with wounds to draw more alms from people. The young girls and women from those areas are the most vulnerable ones and often forced into prostitution. Those who escape anyhow often indulge themselves in various crimes.
Considering all this Community Intiative Foundation started “Education for All”, a project in January 2017. In this project, the members of CIF started interacting with children of three different slums (in Manohar Nagar, Shankar Garden and Goyla Dairy) of Delhi through various games and stories. Distribution of free chocolates after each session, helped the NGO to entice more children. Once the children became comfortable, the members of CIF started teaching the basics of English, Mathematics and Science along with meditation to those children. The shelters built in nearby parks were classrooms.
The members also identified the children in those slums who were not going to schools and talked to their parents to know the reason. There were several reasons such as some have just migrated there, some didn’t have Aadhaar card or other documents, some have been absconded because of low attendance and some had to go to work to earn money. The CIF members convinced the parents about the importance of education and helped them to get their children enrolled in schools.
Apart from this, more than 95 students are taught by the CIF volunteers. The weekend classes are now updated into weekday classes at Goyla Dairy. The shelter classrooms have been transformed into closed rented classrooms and children now have access to computers in the regular classes.
Community Initiative Foundation: Involved in other social activities
Community Initiative Foundation has been involved in other social activities as well. In winter of 2018, the NGO started “Blanket Distribution Campaign” in which the volunteers searched for people who didn’t have warm clothes and blanket to cover themselves from cold breezes. The volunteers distributed blankets and warm clothes between the poor.
Helped migrant families in Corona-outbreak
During Covid-19 outbreak, when the lockdown was imposed in the country, there were migrant families living in Delhi who couldn’t get the benefits of state government schemes due to lack of documents.
“Though the state government had started the e-coupon ration scheme for non-ration cardholders, the need for ration was significantly high. The government had planned the scheme for 10 lac people although more than 34 lac people applied for it in the very first week.
With under lockdown, all our classes had stopped but we were still in touch with people from slums we cater. We started receiving distressed calls from these slums for the need for ration. With the help of our volunteers and donors, we were able to arrange ration for 20 families. But soon we started receiving more calls, hence we actively started looking to connect to more helping hands. Many social workers,individuals, nonprofit organizations, and local authorities came together to support us. With their support, we were able to help around 3000+ people” said Bhaskar Kumar, Executive director of Community Initiative Foundation in his note to Startup Anecdotes.
Besides this, Community Initiative Foundation is continuously working on its mission of providing free education to poor children and it hopes that one day the children taught by its members will fulfill their and parents’ dream and live a beautiful life.
(Edited by Team Startup Anecdotes)
