Kolkata teen sets up NGO to educate street-kids

KOLKATA: A student of Modern High School has become a social change-agent by bringing education into the lives of dozens of underprivileged and street kids.
Sangam, a NGO started by her, collects books, exercise books, stationary and other education material to distribute them among the poor children. “ We are team of girls who not only undertake various drives to collect the books and study material but also hold workshops to enable the proper use of the books and stuff collected by us,” says Sukriti Chiripal, a student of class 11.
Recently, to celebrate Friendship day in the true sense of it, they conducted a workshop called “Trash to Treasure” wherein not only did they recycle used exercise books to create usable fresh copies but also undertook various fun learning activities for the children. The team which comprised of students from classes 6- 12, had started an initiative to start binding and creating exercise books from all the recycled copies they collected. "During our collection drives, we often received half used exercise books and felt that recycling the fresh pages from these would be a big help in generating even more books the children could use", she mentioned about this unique initiative.
“The idea to start this came to me 2 years ago, when some street children had come to collect donation. When asked why they weren’t in school they mentioned that their parents didn’t think it was worthwhile. I was astounded by this. What struck me more that the parents were still willing to send the boys to the local school but not the girls." Sukriti mentioned.
She initially started visiting the families of these children to convince them to send their kids to the local school. “Initially I was told to leave and they wouldn’t talk to me. However, we kept visiting them and started giving them books which we were collecting. They gradually decided to pay heed to us” Sukriti recalled.
Their collection drives initially started in south Kolkata since she is based in Alipore but gradually extended to various other parts of the city. During one of their major drives last year, they were able to collect more than 600 books and large volumes of stationary which benefited scores of underprivileged children. Fellow students from schools like Modern High School for Girls and Mahadevi Birla Shishu Vihar have extended their support and she looks forward to even more volunteers in the coming months.
She was initially supported by her parents and members of the joint family and then reached out to like minded students in the city. Her father, who has his own business, and her mother, who is a housewife, believed in her and stood by her through all the ups and downs. "We started out with just one idea to help these kids. Today, after two years of efforts, we have over 50 volunteers and teams in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Kolkata with Bangalore and Raipur teams to start shortly. We want to help support in the education of as many underprivileged children as possible” she mentioned.