Today I woke early with excitement for our third day of teaching at the Children’s Hope facility. With the extraordinary assistance from the Jesus & Mary college students interpreting for us, I truly felt that the students in the computer classes understood the overall objectives from the previous lessons. The classes were divided into two primary groups; one class consisted of students from the Children’s Hope vocational computer training classes and the other group was made up of older students from Kathputli Colony that also attended formal schooling. Not only were all the students very receptive to the curriculum, but they were eager to share their research with the rest of the class and elaborate on the topics with their personal knowledge and experiences.

Following our lessons, we hopped into the taxi and drove to the original Prayas boy shelter home in Jahangirpuri. We were scheduled to meet with Mrs. Arun Grover to learn about the Microfinance program she helped initiate 6 months prior. We were very excited to hear about the success of the program thus far and the opportunities for future expansion to other Prayas and Children’s Hope locations. After our meeting, we were given a tour to see some of the micro-enterprises taking place on the grounds of the facility. These included a print shop for making business cards, folders and certificates, a tailoring studio for sewing women’s clothing and creating student uniforms, a bakery that supplied food for the shelter home and community, a laundry room for cleaning the boys in the shelter’s clothing and a small branch of the local bank that provided older community members the ability to own savings accounts that were not accessible to them beforehand. While each of these micro-enterprises were self-sustaining, they regrettably lacked the ability to provide any substantial profits for the shelter or the students managing the operations.

That evening, the three of us discussed the implications of future Children’s Hope India projects for our local UF chapter. These ranged from helping to expand the Microfinance program to more individuals and locations, to finding a viable business model for all of the micro-enterprises taking place at the facilities we visited, to creating a technology program/software linking various NGO’s needs to donors, to developing a long term global education curriculum contingent to what we had already created. Only time would tell which of these projects would become our next top priority…

Thanks for listening,
Melissa