Imagine living 19 years of your life in a 10*10 sq.ft room with 20 other children eating, playing, sleeping, reading in the same space. Such was our NGO’s target audience. Guided by an objective of providing holistic development to children-at-risk, our flagship project was to improve their communication skills. For that, we recruited volunteers, trained them and placed them in orphanages. The volunteers taught the children every Saturday and Sunday but we noticed that the gap 5 weekdays in between when there were no classes were doing a lot of harm to our project.
To mitigate this,
Idea: we decided that we could get children access to libraries
Challenge: Children are not allowed to go outside their shelter homes for security reasons
Next idea: Build libraries inside the shelter homes
Challenge(s): Space constraints, fund constraints, resource constraints.
Next idea: Let’s resolve them!
Conditions for resolving the issues:
1. No money
2. Plenty of human resources
3. Strike a balance between the requirements and offerings of the orphanage authorities and our objectives.
SPACE CONSTRAINTS:
Extremely limited space –
came up with a competition open to students in architecture colleges on how to best utilise the space and convert it into a library
Received excellent idea submissions and went on to implement them which made the best use of limited space.
FUND CONSTRAINTS:
Rallied support from parents of the volunteers and peers at work place for initial investments to procure books and stationery.
Researched further and found two organisations that looked promising fit with our model.
Bookwallah: Is a US-based organisation which conducts book donation drives and ships them to the developing countries on a need-basis.
Hippocampus: is an India-based organisation specially working in the field of building library operational models. From levelling the books to categorising the children’s reading levels to track book borrowing to training librarians on the most effective ways to encourage reading habits.
Making these two organisations our participants was the best action plan as it provided our children excellent quality books and well trained and passionate library volunteers to guide them through their exploration of the treasures that the books held.
A lot of details needed to be ironed out all through the process and quite a few tweaks and adjustments made their way into the original proposal. We understood the challenges of working with external collaborators at the same time came to appreciate the strengths they come with.
This model became so successful that we scaled it to 8 libraries running in 5 cities in India catering to 600 children in orphanages.
Look at our latest library we opened on Nov 14th, celebrated as children’s day in India
