Kalpakta

About the organization

Our vision is to develop critical thinking in the children through a culture of reading. Our mission is to build strong reading habit and language skills in children. In terms of strategy, we will try to map the progress of each child who comes to the library. We will note the children’s progress. We will continue our work in one district panchayat school. We will implement it in multiple schools by sharing our work with teachers or directly working with the children.

Location of the project

Primary Location: Sirsi, district Nagpur. We are working in village Sirsi which is 85 km from Nagpur. It is a remote area with poor connectivity. We are implementing this project in Kalpakta’s center and one Zila Parishad school, Chanoda. As we are doing a pilot project of FLN in a government school, a lot of new learnings are emerging. We are doing this because we found that the government school in our location does not have quality education and hence the lack of reading culture. This is why we are promoting libraries.

Wipro Foundation has offered a fellowship to Kalpkata co-founder. This fellowship serves to achieve various objectives: 

• Develop a strong foundational literacy program; 
• Implement the foundational literacy program in ZP schools; 
• Build the capacity of staff in the domain of literacy and library-education; 
• Documentation of work and development of the organization. 

Learning

• The trainings offered through Wipro network were helpful in developing organizational capacity. Both the cofounders have attended the course offered by OELP. 
• Library program that we are developing is very new concept for the village. 

Challenges

• The main question or challenge we face is that kids are not coming as regularly as expected. Owing to this it is difficult to create and measure impact on their reading skills. 
• Our staff’s understanding of working with children is enhanced. However, they need to attend external workshops to augment their knowledge base. 

Plan of action

We will focus on the existing program instead of going for a new one. We will try out new pedagogies and practices and see what suits our context. We build team capacity through training and workshops. We will share the learnings with team members so that they can apply them as they work with the children. We will expand our network of people. We will continue to work in the school and center. The thrust of our future operations can be explained under three headings:

Organizational: As a continuing exercise, we will invest in creating and participating in fundraising campaigns. We will invest in the finalization of an organizational website, and we have already undertaken some work in this respect. We will start the search process to hire another facilitator/staff member to increase the organizational capacity. We will develop an internal organizational policy document specific to our staff members and another document in compliance with the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, (POCSO Act).  

Operational: We will continue managing the existing community reading center. We will undertake procurement of new books: Currently, we have a total stock of 1200 books, and we want to procure 300 more contextually and age-appropriate books We wish to refine book issue management process: We will focus on strengthening the processes surrounding the nature of books being availed by children. We will maintain unique Student Records. We want to track each of the 200 students coming to our center and the books accessed by students of different ages, grade, and genders children. We want to conduct local community/ household campaigns so that we increase the reach to 50 additional students. 

Educational: We will make field visits to external/expert organizations that are more mature in the line of libraries/language development in Marathi/English. We will stay tuned to the list of training opportunities offered within the Wipro education network. We will spend more and more time on capacity building but at the same time, we will manage the center and school program. We will continue accessing specialized programs such as the library and language-related training for ourselves and facilitators.  We will reflect on our ongoing practices and plan to invest in our capacities/skills.