Team Aasman – Jagriti yatra ’14

  • Education in rural India has been a much discussed and worried about issue. While many were debating over the current situation, Darshil and few of his friends wanted to do something about ; as they had just given their 10th board exams then and had begun to understand the importance of education. Darshil, Viral, Koonj, Nirman and Raj are five friends ; They agreed upon starting off with tutoring the kids over the weekdays. They identified the kids and taught them twice in a week for 2 to 3 hours. This went on for two years along with other activites. In 2011, Aasmaan foundation was formed by these five friends. Slowly Darshil and his friends got to understand these kids better. Team Aasmaan wanted to do more than tutoring and therefore they stepped into raising funds to send some of the kids to private school.

    Overwhelming problems, modern solutions!
    Aasmaan foundation works with a numerous kids from NGOs. Team wanted to train kids on managing money. Instead of organizing a lecture about this topic, they came up with an innovative solution. Team Aasmaan took these kids for shopping. Yeah! You read that right. So there was a shopping trip arranged. Let’s go shopping! Team purchased stuff in various urban areas and then gave fake money notes to the kids. They empowered them with money, each kid was given 2000Inr. Thereafter the team also assigned a volunteer to each group. The fake shopping let the kids explore various aspects of shopping; Kids were taught about saving money as the team believes “A rupee saved is a rupee earned “, Children were also exposed to lending money, and were explained why was it important and when was it done. Over all let’s go shopping is a modern solution for the old problem and also allows the kids to form a shopping team and gain knowledge about money management. “ We did not want to donate the collected items as that might hurt the self respect of the kids” explains Darshil.

    Viral and Darshil are yatris on Jagriti Yatra 2014.
    When asked about their experiences and lessons from JY ’14 they had a few interesting pointers.
    Viral says, “We work with 60 volunteers, every year this number increases depending on the projects we plan to do. And I have noticed many volunteers come to us for profile building or updating on facebook about social work they might possibly do. Well the problem is they are mostly active on the event day and that really helps, but we can do a lot more if we have the support on the initial days too. So before coming to JY’14, I wanted to study about the work that goes behind organizing such a big event. Then I get to know that ERC members play a very crucial role in the entire process before and after yatra. The ERC team is a very strong team consisting very passionate people. Now I know the gaps between the dots in Aasmaan, so far this journey has helped me identify the area of improvements in our Ngo. I also realize ours is not just a non- profit organization but a for purpose organization. There are a lot of things I learned about team building and bonding through various sessions at JY’14 will implement most of them as we need a very strong team to be able to help more people in need”.
    Darshil says” I just want to go and win a world cup’ that’s the kind of energy at JY. Want to infuse my entire team with the same energy “.
    We believe in “do a good deed a day and get sound sleep by night “.

    Kudos team Aasmaan!

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