Jan Madhyam is an idea that was born on the lawns of Jamia Milia Islamia University, New Delhi, in 1980.  Jolly Rohatagi, an artist and Ranjana Pandey, a puppeteer, were collaborating on a multi-media program for pre-schoolers. Puppets, games, music, dance and crafts were woven together to fire a child's creative imagination. The theme was Learning is Fun and the objective was to provide children with stimuli and tasks that highlighted individual needs and capabilities.  Films, books, games, fact sheets, and puppet plays are central to Jan Madhyam’s mode of education, which has been fine tuned over years to meet the needs of these children in a sensitive manner. Nearly three decades later, Jan Madhyam continues to creatively address the needs of disabled and disadvantaged young women. Over 9,000 children and adults have benefited from Janmadhyam’s outreach programs just last year.

Vibha is proud to be involved with Jan Madhyam.  Efforts are focused under three different components: Sahyog, EORTTEC and Vistaar, on an ongoing basis,

Vistaar is a project of Jan Madhyam developed to spread the learning gathered over two decades of work with marginalized persons especially girls who are intellectually challenged. It introduces multimedia education based on formal school curriculum to teachers and children of schools that cater to mainstream poor students. The main aim of the project is to showcase to the teachers that slow learners and disabled children also can learn through these activities. Tools are also developed to help teachers support Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan (inclusion of Marginalized and Disabled children). Students in classes 4th through 8th learn Environmental Science, Geography, Civics, History, Languages and are also introduced to Life Skills. The target area for the project is Aya Nagar Village and nine of its neighboring villages near New Delhi, on Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road just before Haryana Border. The area is mainly comprised of small farmers and cattle keepers.

Farmers are losing their lands to rapid urbanization and therefore their primary means to livelihood. JanMadhyam is committed to helping these children by working with the local schools. The government schools in villages around Ayanagar are actively encouraged to enroll challenged children in their schools. Over 1,000 children from the area have thus far benefitted from this program.

EORTTEC(Equal Opportunity Rural Technical Training and Education Centre) is an equal opportunity training program. Its major focus has been on rehabilitation within the community. Over 160 children in and around New Delhi benefit from this program.

The Sahayog component is a parent Teacher training program. The goal is to provide their disabled students in targeted villages from various parts of India, an experience of the vocational world. Teachers are trained and sensitized to the needs of these students who are instructed in daily living skills in a nurturing environment. Currently, the organization reaches out to about 130 able and disabled beneficiaries.

For more details and success stories from Jan Madhyam, see

http://www.janmadhyam.org/index.php?id=60

The Dallas Chapter, one of the oldest and most of the active since Vibha’s inception is proud to organize its 10th walk this year on Sept 14, 2008 at White Rock Lake. It has been a decade of hardwork, a decade of dedication, a decade of hurdles and confidence and will to surpass those hurdles, and the flame is still glowing, just a bit more brighter, a bit more stronger.

The first walk in Dallas took place in 1998, when a small group of enthusiastic volunteers took the very first step and paved the path for a noble cause. Although it was the first walk and was organized on a small scale , the energy and the impact that would follow it in the succeeding years were colossal. About 50 people (mostly kids from our Dallas project Jefferies Streets Learning Center) joined the volunteers as they opened the gates for more to follow.

After the warm welcome and the interest shown both by volunteers and patrons for the walk in its very year of inception, the dedicated team took on a bigger undertaking for the second year. In 1999, the walk was organized around Bachman lake – A small fresh water lake located in the Love Field Airport Neighbourhood of Northwest Dallas. Covering around 205 acres with a 3.3mile running trail along the boundary, located at the heart of the city, this was a perfect place for an event of such scale and such visibility. It was a great success. The dreams of these dedicated volunteers came true. The hard work and sweat paid off with more than 300 people attending the event. Year 2000 was the hatrick year In it’s third year, the Dallas walk broke a number of 450.

There were some trying years between then and now, but 2008 promises to be special. The 30 volunteers are giving it their all. The venue has been changed to White Rock, the re branding to Dream Mile has provided a great deal of credibility, publicity and visibility, $10K has already been raised in pledges, the team is targeting serious and professional runners as well as amateurs. This team has a great attitude and is high in spirit.

 

Some photographs from The Dallas Vibha Walk 2007

Even as we all take for granted the miracle of our times –unlimited, ubiquitous information 24/7, we completely lose sight of the technology that powers it and the people behind that technology – the ones who make it all happen.

The Vibha IT project team is small, but highly productive.  Key responsibilities include developing tools to ease the project selection and management process and maintaining and upgrading Vibha’s internet face; www.vibha.org.

Project Management: Vibha receives hundreds of project proposals and volunteers need a monumental amount of organized information at their fingertips so that they can review project proposals thoroughly and manage and monitor projects efficiently. The IT team fulfills this requirement through a database technology called Django. All information about a project - documents, facts, pictures, monitoring reports, visit reports etc. are recorded in a database. Volunteers can login to the database and access any information they want; record new documentation, look at the history of a project and so on. The software provides automatic tools for various alerts; for e.g, when a funding is due to a project or when a visit is due. It helps focus volunteers’ time on what they do best – selecting and monitoring projects that Vibha supports, leaving the tedium to computer software.

Vibha’s web presence: Vibha owns several domain names: www.vibha.org, www.dreammile.org, www.vibhadandia.org etc. Content for all these domains is powered by an infrastructure called Mediawiki, the same infrastructure that powers Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Vibha’s website has more than 600 unique pages which is hard to maintain with a small team. Mediawiki is a true collaborative publishing tool which decentralizes creation and management of content over a large user base (volunteers) who are spread out all over the country. Through Mediawiki, creating a web page is a matter of minutes. Volunteers need no  knowledge of html or css. they can simply type in content, wrap it around simple syntax rules called wiki markup, which are much simpler than html rules and voila, we've got a web page…

To date migrating Vibha’s web page content to Mediawiki has been the IT team’s  proudest  accomplishment - enabling and empowering the volunteer base to take collective ownership of managing website content is inline with our mission statement. The tech whizzes had to modify the Mediawiki software to make it fit for purpose, which took 3 weeks of concerted effort of two volunteers, but it got done. Now, more than 70 volunteers collectively maintain the content in true collaborative fashion. Now that maintaining content is no longer in the hands of the small IT team (used to be earlier...imagine the pains of fixing 600 pages as and when issues come up!), the team has two hands free to focus on other tasks that further simplify the jobs of our   volunteers.

Future Plans: Major activity is underway with another application, “Salesforce” to further improve volunteer efficiency. Vibha aspires to catch the web2.0 train. A lot of exciting online social media is out there to take advantage of - Facebook widgets particularly is the key excitement provider for this team.

If  there are an experts in this arena, now is your opportunity to join the them,for those of you tech savvies whose interest has been piqued, do contact our IT team if you have basic working knowledge in CSS, Python, Django, PHP, Salesforce.com, or Mediawiki.Practice great IT skills while working for the cause of underprivileged children.

The next time you open an issue of Vibha Xpressions or log onto www.vibha.org., say a silent thanks to the mighty team of 5 that brings this information to your doorstep. All good things come in small packages.

Your feedback is important to us. Vibha welcomes any comments, suggestions or questions you may have about our projects, programs, products, monitoring etc. If you are particularly interested in a topic and would like to see Vibha showcase it please let us know.

Together, we can do much more!

Dream a Little! Do a Little!

Vibha 1030 E El Camino Real, #424 Sunnyvale, CA 94087
Phone: 408-997-9992 | Fax: 775-593-1061

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