Feathers

Partner From
- On Going

Supported by: Wipro

About the organization

FEATHERS is a not-for-profit organization promoted in 2016 to work among children with special educational needs (SEN), particularly from disadvantaged communities. It started its work with children identified with developmental delays, children with special needs, and children with special educational needs. FEATHERS envisions “building an inclusive society with enshrined values of enabling, excellence, equality, equity, and humaneness. Its mission is Laying Foundation for Enabling Action to Transform Human Excellence with Resilience and Self-reliance.’

Objectives

  • Reach out to children with special needs requiring professional assistance and offer on-campus and off-campus remediation services.
  • Create awareness among the parents for identifying special needs in their children, seeking timely and appropriate medical and rehabilitation support.
  • Provide education and training to aspiring youth and mothers of children with special needs on rehabilitation, care, and support.
  • Work with like-minded individuals and institutions to further the cause of children with special needs through research, training, and policy initiatives.

Initiatives

Initially, FEATHERS had set up a centre in Madurai City, and later we realized that the rural poor families with these types of children are left with no option, and we decided to shift our work from Madurai City to a rural area and we have chosen Thirumangalam, which is an agrarian block with rainfed farmers. After initiating community-based activity, we started our intervention in Children with learning difficulties and children with learning disabilities at Government Primary Schools with the permission of the CEO, Madurai district, and did Early intervention services at the Thirumangalam FEATHERS office itself.

Program updates

We started our community-based intervention with the support of the Wipro Fellowship and began intervention at five Government Primary Schools in Thirumangalam. First, we had an initial discussion with the headmistress and class teacher and identified children facing difficulties in the classroom. We conducted a baseline assessment and confirmed the children who had learning difficulties and a few children with specific learning disabilities. We completed this initial assessment during March and April 2022. We have also made home visits and collected all basic family and educational environment details during May 2022.

After school reopening, we have started our remedial education in five schools. We have conducted remedial classes through one-on-one sessions. Currently, we are working with 73 children from five primary schools. The major challenge is insufficient space in the primary schools, due to which our teachers are finding it difficult to carry on one-on-one sessions. Sometimes, headmistresses do not give much importance to our work, they are often remedial teachers for doing their regular classwork. There are caste discriminations observed in the Government Schools.

Our plan for the coming three years will be to expand our interventions with learning difficulties and learning disabilities from five schools to fifty schools and continue our intensive work in early intervention for the children with developmental delays and Children with Special needs at Thirumangalam block. We also have a plan to expand our work near another economically backward and aspirational district, Virudhunagar.

The team in FEATHERS needs to acquire skills in resource mobilization, as FEATHERS must expand and sustain its efforts. It must work significantly towards attracting new donors, convince them of the concept, and write proposals. Secondly, the challenge is handling social media / online platforms effectively to reach out to the parents and well-wishers. We feel this is an important activity to position our works and it will help us connect with the public, philanthropic individuals, and institutions. We require guidance, capacity, and support in these aspects. We see both these domains are connected and we would like to augment our skills in these domains in the coming years to enhance the reach and impact of our work.

Plans for the next 1-3 years

In the coming three years we will invest substantially in the expansion of our initiative. Horizontally, we will expand our program in Early Intervention in nearby Virudhunagar Town in Virudhunagar District, which is an aspirational district. We have got some preliminary acceptance for our proposal from a local CSR Organisation. In Thirumangalam, we will expand our program by establishing a Community Learning Centre with the ragpickers community on the outskirts of Thirumangalam Town.

  1. Vertically, we will deepen our initiative by way of enriching our capacity in designing and implementing remedial programs for addressing the issues of learning difficulties and SLDs. We will work in collaboration with like-minded institutions and resource agencies to reinforce our capacity. We will evolve and design locally relevant teaching and learning materials and conduct training programs for our volunteers and teachers from other schools. By the end of the third year, FEATHERS would have emerged as a resource center with the potential for excellence in the field of education.
  2. We would have attended several workshops and seminars on the theme of teaching- learning facilitation for children with learning difficulties and organized similar programs in collaboration with like-minded institutions. We would have enhanced our financial capacity through appropriate resource mobilization strategies and equipped ourselves to handle program expansion.

In the year 2023-24, our focus will be on the following outcomes:

Operational:

  1. Expanding/Deepening our Remediation Programme in 15 Panchayat Union Primary Schools
  2. Recruiting and training 3 more qualified educators in the remediation process and deploying them to reach out to 150 children, identified with learning difficulties.
  3. Mobilising resources to run the full-fledged remediation program to the tune of Rs. 25.00 lakhs.
  4. Initiating a community-based Early Intervention Programme with an outlay of Rs. 35 lakhs to benefit the entire block of Thirumangalam.
  5. Regularising Art-Integrated Learning Programme in all the working schools.

Educational:

  1. Conducting one Capacity Building Programme for the working teachers with Learning Disability, benefiting 20 to 25 teachers from other schools during this summer vacation.
  2. Conducting in-house capacity-building programs for the Teachers in FEATHERS on advancements in remedial education tools and methods. Conducting FOUR structured training programs, at least one in each quarter.
  3. Launching a YouTube Channel for parents and teachers on handling children with learning difficulties.

 Organisational:

  1. Resource mobilization to strengthen the existing programs such as Remedial education, early intervention, and art-integrated learning programs and expand our interventions in nearby Virudhunagar by writing and sharing with relevant philanthropic institutions.
  2. Following up on FCRA clearance and streamlining all the statutory compliances.