Lighting the spark in kids
A non-profit organisation working among school children is doing a great job in helping them understand their potential.
Amaara Foundation is a non-profit 0rganisation that focuses on empowering school students, especially those from government schools, by teaching them life skills, soft skills and spoken English. For the 2018-19 academic year, the organisation has adopted five centres — R.L.V. Thrippunithura, L.M.C.C. Pachalam, Padamugal U.P. School, Edapally U.P. School and Mar Athensious School, Kakkanad.
Every year, the organisation conducts camps to help students understand their real potential. The camps have experts in the areas of music, crafts, yoga and public speaking to help the students in gaining more knowledge on these activities. In January, they conduct an inter-school literacy and cultural fest — ‘Kalakaar’ — at R.L.V. Thrippunithura. Students from all the centres take part in various literary and cultural competitions representing their schools. This academic year came to an end on February 16th, marking which Amaara organised their annual event — ‘Amaara Day’. All the volunteers, parents, school authorities and students shared a single platform to acknowledge the winners of Kalakaar and award the outstanding efforts put in by the volunteers. This year, P.N. Rao, Chief Commissioner of Customs, Central Excise and Service Inc, was the chief guest. Various cultural events performed by both the students and the volunteers made the day even brighter.
“We have a lot of volunteers from different fields, including homemakers, college students and also officials from the corporate fields to train the students. It gives us great happiness to be an organisation that is dedicated to empowering children. Our volunteers who take it as a personal commitment to bring out the best from the students are our greatest strength. We constantly seek opportunities to inspire our children,” says Rashmi, chief mentor, Amaara Foundation.
The foundation also schedules educational tours. This year the students were taken to Wipro Technologies to know more about the corporate world. Launched in 2010, Amaara Foundation introduced a new project this year called Deepam. Under the scheme, a few selected students from the flood-affected areas were given scholarships.
The foundation ropes in new volunteers twice in a year based on their skills and qualification. The medium of communication is English, which is used to develop the proficiency of the students in the language. In the coming year, they will launch a new project which is under discussion at the moment.