Meet Jahnavi, a Class XII student who has her own NGO
Deepkamal Kaur
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, July 20
A Class XII girl from the city has set up an NGO ‘Word Builders’ that has been imparting courses for dropouts and slum children of not only Jalandhar, but Bihar, Mumbai and Bengaluru as well. She is helping them improve their employability skills.
A commerce student of Cambridge International School for Girls, Jahnavi Mahajan, has already imparted six types of 12-hour courses to 300 students, including those on improving speech and writing skills in English, using email, making power point presentations, HTML coding, appearing for interviews and honing business skills.
“They are all children who have studied in Classes VI to XII, who wanted to continue with their studies but were deprived of any such opportunity. We used the ‘Tribe for Good’ programme to help identify such children, who were keen on learning but were awaiting some help. We specially designed short-term courses for them and started one-to-one, one-hour learning sessions for them through Zoom or Whatsapp,” says Jahnavi, who has set up a team of 25 teenagers like her.
Daughter of sports goods exporter Ashish Mahajan, Jahnavi said when she started the project in August 2019, she asked those interested in her NGO to apply for joining.
“About 50 youths applied and on the basis of their seriousness to continue in the long run, I selected 25 of them who are studying in Classes X to XII. Having set up a team, we collaborated with renowned NGOs such as Tara in New Delhi, Oscar Foundation in Mumbai, Sakshi in Bihar, New Hope in Bengaluru and Saraswati Sanstha Niketan in Jalandhar. Having initially developed links with slum communities through these NGOs, we now have our own network of slum dwellers and children in six states,” she says.
Jahnavi adds: “While we started this project last year, it took a new pace from mid-March onwards in the lockdown, when we got a lot of time to improve our set up because of the lockdown. We named our courses in a very innovative way so as to connect with the children – we call English language programme as ‘Angrezi medium’, business skills as ‘Mann ki Baat’, coding and technology programme as Digiwave.”
Invests 9-10 hours a week on the programme
- While Jahnavi is herself the curator of Computorian programme and makes sure that she spends 9-10 hours a week on it, she has in her team Apeejay School student Harsahib Sodhi as curator for Angrezi Medium and Digiwave programme, Aaliah Janeja as curator for socioholic and Mann ki Baat programmes besides other 23 members.
- Having herself designed her NGO portal, she says she had learnt coding and developed a mobile application too.
“Next year, I plan to go to the US and take admission to an undergraduate course, which will help me in reaching my goal to launch a technological set up that can have an impact on society,” she said, adding that it was really satisfying working with the underprivileged kids, especially when they send back a voice message to you telling you to send them another project assignment.
Having done some exercises for fund raising for slum kids as well, she says at least one of the parents had a smart phone, which was made available to children at least for an hour on Saturdays and Sundays, through which the entire programme was carried on.
