Ashayen

Vision: To create a healthy space for every child living on the streets to reach their full potential.

Mission: To ensure education for every child living on the streets and connect them with the mainstream. To expand their opportunities to reach their full potential in terms of skill, talents and interest.

Strategy: Using an integrative model, Ashayen works to empower homeless children and is developing a community-based rehabilitation program to guarantee a long-term solution. We have discovered that the best way to reintegrate people into mainstream society is through education. To give them a place for growth, we have built five community centers in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, called Ama Paathshala.

Location: Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

Project name: Aama Pathashala
Children living on the streets will receive education, socio-emotional support, and behavioral guidance to enable them to be enrolled in the formal schooling system.

Organizational goals: Recruit at least three additional staff with expertise in education to strengthen the organization’s interventions. Stabilize the organization by building a robust fundraising strategy, including but not limited to getting additional institutional funding for the organization.

Operational goals:

1. Continue work in the five Aama Pathshalas, increasing the number of children supported from 220 to around 300.
2. The work in the Aama Pathshalas will include a school preparatory program for out- of-school street children between the ages 6 to 14 to be enrolled into the formal schooling system, and an education support program for children from grades 1-10 already going to school.
3. Collaborate with around 60 teachers and headteachers from across 15 government schools to ensure enrolment of the children in the schools and work with them to track attendance and engagement. Track attendance and engagement of enrolled children to ensure their retention and learning and to strengthen their intervention to reduce the school dropout rates amongst these children.

Educational goals: We plan to build organizational capacity in literacy, numeracy, and life skills through research, practice, internal capacity-building efforts, participation in external capacity-building offerings, engaging with other organizations in the domain, and other relevant efforts. Customize and develop learning modules specific to the needs of street children. We will also take steps toward documentation of organizational, educational, and operational journeys, reflections, and learnings.

Learnings: We have made significant progress in designing assessment tools, module designing ideas, budgeting, and salary structure. We have also learned a lot about pitching for CSR grants and about legal compliance for partnerships and grants.

Challenges: We faced challenges in documentation and hiring regular staff due to a lower salary budget.

Plans for FY 2023-2024

1. To start a school in the police station and reach an additional 100 children directly.
2. Plan to declare Bhubaneswar a child beggar-free city by 2024.
3. Implement a Behavioural Development Module with schoolteachers.
4. Conduct capacity-building training on SEL, multilingual problems, and the use of library.
5. Conduct literacy and numeracy fairs to develop the FLN level of children in government schools.
6. Capacity building training of government schoolteachers on street children’s behavioral development module.
7. Plan to spend 40% of the time on capacity-building.
8. SEL training for educators and some of the core team leaders.
9. Multilingual education, training for digital documentation, and library management training for educators and second-line team leaders.
10. HR and finance management training for core team members