Now there are 66 chapters of ASHA all over the world with several hundred volunteers. I met two volunteers of the ASHA, Chennai chapter, Lakshmi Suryanarayanan, Principal of Olcott School and S Arjunan, a retired industrialist and got information about their work and achievements.
Asha, as an organization world wide is involved in various social projects and in Chennai they focus primarily on education. They have various activities that are ongoing in several parts of Tamil Nadu and it can be broadly classified into projects.
‘Poorna Vidhya’ and ‘Sangamam’ are two projects where a few government and corporation schools have been identified and they are being developed. They have 8 schools that benefit from this project. They have employed teachers in these schools and also volunteers of ASHA go as a team and train both teachers and students periodically.
Project ‘First step’ is where they work together with Integrated Child Development Organisation (ICDS) to renovate and improve the Balwadis. Balwadis are government organizations that take care of children education in the pre-school stage. ASHA, Chennai has adopted 8 Balwadis in the city of Chennai and around it. The Government provides about 80% of the funding, they provide the balance crucial 20% for them to function well and also involve these children in a lot of extra curricular activities.
ASHA is providing scholarship for education to about 120 individual students who are good at studies. Most of these children are from Chennai but there are a few from other rural areas of Tamil Nadu also. A few engineers and a medical college student have benefited from this scheme. They are also involved in making training materials which are useful to train children and distribute it to the different schools. They are working in several tsunami affected areas by giving the children a ‘back to school kit’ to motivate them to get back to their schools and continue their studies with interest.
Project called TEA-Trust is one where they work in tandem with certain NGO’s which are already established, by taking care of their day to day running expenses. Every year for the last five years they have been conducting a workshop called ‘Right Start’ which has teachers from Chennai and surrounding rural areas attending to have the right kind of start to their teaching careers. They have been covering attitudinal development, languages Tamil and English, mathematics etc… and supply training materials also.
Lakshmi said “The first chapter of Asha, India started off in Uttar Pradesh and now there are several chapters across our country. We are a very democratic setup as far as the volunteers are concerned and there are about 10 volunteers who have been regulars over the years in Chennai. We have more volunteers who offer their services periodically for shorter durations. We are always open to receive help from people whether they contribute money or their time to help the under privileged in the society.”
Arjunan added, “The students who have received help from ASHA have fared well for themselves and we are quite happy about the progress exhibited by them. Most of them are also eager to contribute back to this organization, in terms of money or volunteering their services so that more people like them benefit through the projects of ASHA.”
A small spark in the form of a thought to do some good for their homeland from afar began in a small way and that has spread across the globe with ASHA today operating from several countries like the US, Australia, Singapore, UK etc…. ASHA means ‘Hope’ in a few Indian languages and indeed it is providing rays of hope for several deserving individuals to grow and organizations to develop the field of education.
Visit www.ashanet.org/chennai
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