Culture and Heritage Conservation
Cultural heritage is a sense of shared identity, a sense of belonging within society, its customs, tradition, history, environment and diversity. It provides a context to understand the tradition. It helps to develop a strong ethical foundation for individual as a members of a group that provides a ground for social cohesion as well as to resonate with contemporary world with a power of empathy while living in a diverse cultural settings. Believing this philosophy we at Banipur Sahayog is working to sensitise children and community about their traditional art, culture, heritage, common history and diversity. Through event, workshop and meeting we promote a sense of unity, identity and cultural pride that foster a more inclusive, respectful, resilient neighbourhood.
Promoting Inclusive and Culturally Root
At Salboni, Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal, Banipur Sahayog is working to ensure quality education among children from tribal, mahato and other caste resides in nearby forest area. As preliminary step , the organisation has facilitate these children to enrol in nearby Bengali medium school. But it has been noticed that most of the Santali children at primary level are facing the problem of bilingualism. Keeping the context of problem like bilingualism, we at Banipur Sahayog have develop customised education programme for the beginners and student of primary level As part of the personality development for these culturally diverse and marginalised children, Banipur Sahayog organises workshop on traditional dance form, art, culture and other creative workshop, observe important days with children and villagers together. These events helped to spread a sense of cultural pride, social cohesion, helped children to understand the beauty of diversity within unity.
In order to promote the basic competencies of children, parents and teachers, Sahayog organizes several activities and events focusing on:
Improved learning outcome.
Students’ participation in social activities and development.
Parents' awareness on importance of children’s education.
Modern techniques of teaching.
Activities with children and their parents
Sahayog has tried to achieve the results stated above by organizing group sessions with children and parents. In these sessions it has mostly used qualitative projective techniques to open up and to assess the participants’ understanding and attitude. Finally, it provides right information to update the knowledge level and helping the participants to perform in the right direction.
Thus, Sahayog ensures quality work for quality outcome through organizing various school level events such as:
Reading competition
Storytelling session
Quiz competition
Sentence completion sessions
Drawing competition
Observation of important days / weeks
In Kolkata, at ward 63, as an integral part of heritage conservation programme, Banipur Sahayog has worked with community with the purpose to reuse the conserved place by the nearby contemporary community. By initiating awareness events the organisation sensitised the local community about their shared cultural identity even though they are from diverse cultural background. Strategically the programme conducted a need assessment study and identified the issues caused the degeneration of the area .The study has recommended to start education and general health project for children and their parents residing in the area with awareness raising event on the historical importance of the area. A weekly value education class were initiated gradually subject specific coaching support were extended to the children. A micro entrepreneurship for local adolescent girl and for mothers were started. Gradually the conserved place become recognised and utilised as primary civic space and a source of pride for local people.
Activities with school teachers
To ensure effective, quality teaching, Banipur Sahayog has conducted several workshops with teachers. The agenda of these workshops are primarily developed with several discussions with teachers facilitated by an expert. In these sessions teachers share their experiences in given situations. The issues are analysed, discussed by the expert and the applications of best possible teaching method for the situation is evolved. In such problem solving sessions or workshops, various models of’Teaching Learning Materials’ (TLM) and lesson plans are also shown and/or developed through group activities. It is expected that the trained teacher will share these advance teaching techniques with their colleagues and will apply in their classes. The purpose of these sessions are to ensure better quality of teaching with increased learning outcome for their students.
Activities to promote save environment campaign
‘Save Environment and Save Life’ is the mission of Sahayog’s saveenvironment programme. It carries outplantation workat adjacent fields at schools and different locations with active participation of school students and community. The organisation believes that an ‘Environment Sensitive’ community leads healthy life which in turn leads to prosperity. It has organised several sessions with community women groupson issues of ‘save environment’ like- ‘process of domestic waste disposal’, ‘plantation at home’, ‘the benefitsofhaving a kitchen garden’,’clean environment and healthy life’, ‘arsenic contamination in ground water and health hazards’, ‘rain water- the free source of sweet and arsenic free water’ etc.
Apart from organising awareness campaigns and sessions on save environment issue, Sahayog has involved with the conservation effort of Scottish Cemetery at Korya Road, Kolkata. The model of conservation at Scottish cemetery is not only an effort to revive the history but has an annex attempt towards reuse of the place on issues of clean green environment. Sahayog has worked to involve the local community to maintain clean, green and safe space in and around the cemetery.
The government officials and Kolkata Municipal Corporation has provided hand holding support towards this project.
Initial dialogues with the community on different development issues helped in identifying problems and need for services in the area including:
Garbage disposal on the roadside and pavements
Water-logging during rains
Irregular services to maintain overall cleanliness in the area
Encroachment on footpath and road by garage
Unclean congested residential areas
No free space for children to play
To address the above issues, Sahayogformed women’s groups with a mission to ensure active participation of these trained and aware women. Sahayog has arranged several training sessions to educate these women on importance of environment, healthy living, drug or substance abuse and loss of youth etc. In response to these project inputs, the women have organized community campaigns on proper way to dispose domestic waste, healthy habits and disease-free lifestyle etc. With the help of these women, Sahayog now organizes value education classes at the cemetery for children on a regular basis.
