A Gap Only Noticed Up Close
From Students to Students: The Power of School-Led Community Initiatives
There’s a certain kind of learning that occurs outside of a desk. It’s the first time a student realises that ‘community’ is not an abstract word in a values statement, but a specific place, of specific kids, that could use something specific from him.
On 7th September, teachers and students from Apeejay School, Saket got a lesson in this very concrete manner. The group visited Pehchaan The Street School’s Noida Centre and distributed 100 stationery kits, 100 notebooks, and 100 sanitary pads, the latter being for said girls’ school’s female students.
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There is good reason to note how unusual this list is. Stationery kits and notebooks are common items to donate and distribute in a school donation drive- they’re useful, welcome, and predictable. The inclusion of sanitary pads is a clear sign that somebody at Apeejay took the time to think past the obvious, and towards something much more difficult, the fact that sanitary hygiene can often be a deciding factor between whether a girl goes to school, and whether she stays there. This is not an unimportant addition to a donation list, but rather a sign that the initiative behind it was well thought out.
What should also be noted is the value of who donated. This was not a corporate CSR cheque or an anonymous institutional grant, but a group of students, along with their teachers, who decided to spend a school day away from their own classroom and into the classrooms of another, at the cost of their own attention. To the students at the Apeejay School who participated, this is a completely different kind of education than what any syllabus could offer, the realisation of what a lack of equal resources can do for a student, and what they themselves can do to combat it, before the end of the school day.
This is the value of school community initiatives as opposed to institutional ones, a cheque written from an office will never teach more than a stationery kit given from a friend. A donation of stationery, given directly by one student to another (roughly the same age, on the same kind of Tuesday), can teach more than a donation report ever would.
None of this is to say that this initiative can single handedly end structural educational inequality. However, 100 girl students at the Noida Centre now have one less hurdle to getting a full month’s education, and 100 students at the Apeejay School now have an idea of what it means to practice the values they are taught.
Schools and educational institutions can carry out impactful community initiatives that extend their learning values beyond their walls, and support education with dignity by contributing learning resources and promoting menstrual hygiene awareness.
Learn more about Pehchaan The Street School at Know about us:
Website: https://pehchaanstreetschool .org
Google: Pehchaan The Street School
Indraprastha Metro Station, Delhi 110001
097117 18972
Review here > https://g.co/kgs/X4x1GL
Facebook page link — https://www.facebook.com /PehchaanTheStreetSchoolOfficial/
Facebook Pehchaan Group link — https://lnkd.in/gyGXxbtu /162142001383888/?ref=share
