Program Updates

Key Advancements, Highlights

This quarter started with celebrating 50 years of Deep Griha’s work in under-resourced communities. The team worked very hard on the preparations for the big day. All the planning and hard work paid off, the event on the 5th of July went off very smoothly. We had a whole lot of people join us virtually from across the world.

The celebrations acknowledged: the foundation laid down by the founders 50 years ago, our supporters and partners both locally and across the globe, and the Deep Griha team over the last 50 years who have made the work that we do possible. We celebrated the community, and the highlight of the event was performances by participants from the various interventions - dances by Deep Griha Academy, City of Child and Aadhar Kendra students, the Tech SMART students performed a musical skit as did the elderly we work with through the Senior Citizen program. The inclusive celebration was hosted in three languages - English, Marathi and Sign language.

Deep Griha’s ex-staff and current staff came together for an informal celebration on the 12th of July. This day was focused on singing and dancing performances by the staff, we had ex-staff sharing memories from their days at Deep Griha. It was a beautiful day as ex-volunteers met up with staff they had worked with in the past. An ex staff member spoke about her years at Deep Griha and her smile is the gist of what she said. The first member of staff who worked with Dr Neela in the clinic spoke about his experience. The dancing was not limited to ‘on-stage’ and the performers and audience took part with all their heart.

Aadhar Kendra Sponsorship Program

The Aadhar Kendra program continued working with 235 children, the highlights this quarter were Mental Health Awareness and Emotional Well-being Workshop

This workshop was open to children from the community too, with 46 participants from the AK program and 24 from the community. Children actively took part in games and discussions, enjoyed the sessions, and shared that the activities helped them understand their emotions better while encouraging open communication.

Parent - Field worker meeting

Through the meeting the parents became aware of their children’s coping strategies, academic and health needs, they understood the need to plan for skill development and welfare access. The communication also strengthened communication with field workers, and were motivated to support their children’s holistic growth.

Children–Field Worker Meetings

The purpose is to create a regular platform for interaction between children and field workers to discuss progress, challenges, and needs related to education, health, and personal development. Children participated actively, shared their challenges openly, and showed enthusiasm in planning upcoming activities. Peer discussions and group interactions enhanced bonding, mutual understanding, and a sense of responsibility among participants.

A recent impact assessment as well as conversations around safeguarding have led us to rethink how we work with young people through Aadhar Kendra. We currently have four individuals working on understanding needs of children starting with under 5 year olds all the way through to 24 year olds as we redesign and rethink interventions.

City of Child

This quarter the numbers at CoC reached 66, the highest it has been since City of Child opened its doors. We did have 5 dropouts leaving the number at 61, still higher than it has ever been. Apart from the challenges of being away from home and family or familiarity, the children who dropped out hadn’t had structure or school for a while and that made it more difficult for them to stay.

Recent experiences with children who hadn’t been to school is one of the areas that we are trying to understand, to find a way to work with children who aren’t a part of the school system anymore. We are also looking to work on family strengthening to see if deeper work with families allows the children to grow and thrive at home, with necessary support from Deep Griha.

Our counselors from Manthan conducted various aptitude tests for the children at City of Child to assess the cognitive abilities, identify individual strengths, reasoning abilities, and areas needing support and to build baseline psychological profiles through standardized tests for future academic and personal guidance. What we found was that 72% of children showed average to above-average reasoning abilities. They were able to identify 10 children who may require additional academic support or intervention.

The children’s responses reflected strong interest in creative arts, technical fields and social professions. Our vocational and agriculture sessions will help with this. We need to find a way to channel the creativity at CoC, and as for helping society, we plan for activities that the children can participate in that will help the community at large: through a cleaning drive in the village, sharing some of their resources with migrant communities in the area and other similar activities where the CoC children give to those around them.

District-Level Karate Championship

Through Rainbow Foundation, who sponsor children and partner with Deep Griha, we facilitate karate classes at CoC on the weekends. The children trained at CoC were able to represent their school at District-level Karate competitions. One of our children got the Silver Medal. We have noticed an improvement in confidence, discipline, and leadership qualities among children who participated in these competitions. We also noticed that the rest of the children were now more motivated to participate in sports activities.