Know About Arpan!

What does Arpan do?

What is it?

We focus mainly on education. Then there is Jagriti, we work on women empowerment and women health, we try to energize women, address their health related issues.

Third is sustainability. We try to create better environment for the needy.

We have kids from age groups of 5 years old to the 50 years old, people from all age groups are associated with us.

The kids are not getting quality education, teachers or parents are not doing their jobs properly, which is not in our hands. Now what is in our hands? We have to extend our hand to help whenever we can to whomever we can. In the past 7-8 years, over 500 students have passed out from our programs. We have a program where we are directly impacting 1700 students.

Our first area is Shastri Nagar (Chandigarh), second is government schools. Shastri Nagar has about 200 students with us.

We work alongside government schools, last year we got a school to teach and we got great results there, this time we have five schools. We work alongside teachers and administration to identify their problems and address them.

We have a lot of avenues, we have “+1” and “+2” students also, then there are students who are in 8th class and do not know alphabets.

In Jagriti track, we speak with women and them that “we teach”, then women come to us to tell us that they want to learn. Plus, we discuss with women about menstrual hygiene, about mosquito related problems, about nutrition. What government should do? If government can take care of education and health, people can take care of the rest.

There were students who could not come to classes due to poor health, kids would not be in good health throughout the year.

We teach women about health, about good money habits and about importance of saving money.

First track is “Padhai”, second is “Jagriti”, third is "Unnati".

In Padhai, our areas are Shastri Nagar and government schools

Our objective is not to make a student pass a class. This is the flaw in the whole system. This concept is flawed; we should focus on imparting knowledge. There is knowledge gap – the main challenge we are tackling. We have seen that whenever a student passes a class and reaches the grade 7th or 8th, his actual knowledge level is two or three grades below.

Teaching is also a very misunderstood profession, many teachers are only there for paychecks. Teachers are not truly bothered about the students. Then there are challenges in the families of students at their homes.

We take a test to understand the knowledge level of the student. Does s/he need to learn alphabet; does s/he need to know basic arithmetic?

We have five levels in which we put the students, viz., Pluto, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Neptune.

In Shastri Nagar, we go for four days a week. In government schools, we implement our model through the teachers, we go their once a week for personality development. We teach them about how to appreciate the beauty of small and little things, to be thankful, how not to make fun of the differently abled students, teach them basic principles of humanity.

Four days that we visit Shastri Nagar for one-hour classes are Tues, Wed, Thurs and Sunday.

In government schools, we teach once a week classes on Personality Development on Wednesday.

In healthcare track, we go to Shastri Nagar once a week, like last week we discussed menstruation and set up a camp with doctor. In the coming weeks, we would be discussing about mosquito borne diseases.

Unnati is our attempt to make kids curious, tempt them to ask questions, excel in extra curricular like poetry, speech writing, public speaking, acting, making science models or "social arts" related model, etc. This runs once in a year for about two months in the summers.

Dated: March 2019