Wings of Doon - An After School Support Program

Aasraa aims to empower the most vulnerable children in Dehradun to help shape their lives and give them a meaningful existence. These children have always been treated like liabilities, we hope to help them become assets, for themselves and for the society. We bring them in, with the help of our Outreach team and help them achieve basic literacy through our Street Smart centers. With dedicated help from our teachers and relentless hard work from the children, we help them mainstream into regular schools.

Our children come from some of the most poverty ridden areas of the city which makes it hard for them to have an environment at home that is conducive to learning. They live in cramped quarters with no electricity or a desk. They lack adult guidance for academics, at home. All this essentially leads to poor understanding of concepts which take a toll on their performance in classrooms. That’s where Aasraa’s program Wings comes in. We give them teachers, proper nutrition, love and encouragement to learn to their heart’s content. With the right environment, a child can thrive and that’s what we aspire to provide these children with.

The most exciting among the recent developments at Aasraa is the triumvirate partnership between Aasraa Trust, The Education Alliance and the Government of Uttarakhand. This gives us the opportunity to convert these under-performing government schools in centers of quality education. This project, School Quality Enhancement Program(SQEP) has helped us enhance the quality of education for the students already enrolled in these schools, as well as the out of school children that Aasraa have mainstreamed to them. The six government schools that come under this particular project are all running our program Wings after the school hours. With over 700 students enrolled under the wings program in these schools, -- have been mainstreamed from Aasraa. We are brimming with pride for our students who are showing constant improvement every day.

Wings program is mandatory for all mainstreamed slum and street children to attend, so we at Aasraa can make sure that they don’t lose track of their progress with their curriculum. This block of time after school provides them with guidance and support for homework and conceptual understanding.

With the amalgamation of technology with traditional forms of learning, we aim to improve computer literacy. The children are eager to use android tablets and computers in our Computer Aided Learning(CAL) classes, that we have been able to provide them for the classes because of our generous donors.