After School Programme for Underserved Children

Dear Maitri Friends,

I write to you today to express our deepest gratitude for your contributions to the Maitrigram Afterschool Program and our students. To recap the last three months at Maitrigram, we are pleased to announce that ten deserving students were able to receive an annual scholarship.

Maitrigram has been working toward creating a holistic supportive education, which means that along with academics, we are teaching important life-skills and complementary education such as safety, environmental awareness, health and hygiene, etc. We have collaborated with other Delhi NGOs to host many fun and informative sessions for the students such as a traffic safety, environmental action and awareness, and menstruation health and hygiene for adolescent girls.

With freshly painted classroom desks and chairs, the students have been preparing for their end of year exams for many long and exhausting hours with the help of their After School Program teachers. With the burden of studying and preparing for nearly two months for these exams, we thought it would be helpful to take some time away from the books to teach the students the life-skill of coping with stress. We also thought that a change of scenery might help, so we organized for the kids to have a few sports activities and play, and have some fun.

Finally, with all hands on deck the teachers, volunteers, and interns are working hard to develop an individual education plan for each student to ensure that each child enrolled in the programme receives the support that they need to be successful. These assessments go beyond assessing just academic performance, and will help to identify the strengths that each child has and their areas of interests and skills that can be honed further. By creating IEPs for each student, we can effectively give them the support that they need to excel in school and become young leaders of their communities.

I want to share with you a short story of one of the scholarship recipients.

Diksha is a 13-year-old girl now in 8^th grade, very bright, always cheerful, and makes others around her smile. Diksha first came to Maitri when she was in 3^rd grade. She loves mathematics and hopes to be a teacher one day. Behind her smiling face is a young girl who has undergone more adversity than many her age. Her father struggles with alcohol and abusive behavior and her mother, a domestic servant, struggles to make ends meet for her and her 3 other siblings. With family tension and an unstable home environment, it is difficult for Diksha to make schoolwork a priority. Despite the difficulty, she puts in extra effort and has shown impressive growth in her academics. She has received this annual scholarship for 3 years now. To her, the scholarship means that her mother can spend her salary on food and other basic necessities rather than struggling to provide for Diksha’s education. Because of this scholarship, Diksha has been able to take responsibility for her own education and that is something that she really treasures because she is determined to chart her own path.