What We Believe
Banipur Sahayog, a not for profit, non-government organisation established in the year 2003 by a group of similar minded professionals & researchers, is devoted to make society better. Since birth, it has adopted concerted affirmative action to catalyse ecological, economic and social development through right based approach. The organization is actively working with community male, female and children along with important stakeholders like government line departments, local government, social institutions and other working agencies. The organisation believes in partnership and prefers working through network or strengthening existing structures or resources.
Activities in the field of education
Banipur Sahayog is working with school children towards ‘quality education’ and ‘improved learning outcome’. The organization believes that quality education opens the door of opportunity and helps children to perceive self, restore self-respect and prosperity. It works with teachers and parents to address the issues of advance teaching, modern pedagogy, social equity especially for the children in the school set up and social transformation of children from lower socio-economic groups. It also capacitates children to ensure their participation in social activities.
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
Apart from events and qualitative sessions, Sahayog has organised Free Coaching Centres within the community set-up. Here the community provides space for their children and Sahayog arranges teachers and coaching materials.
Distribution of Educational Materials such as school bag, exercise book, pen, pencil, eraser, colour crayons, drawing books and winter garments for use in school for the students from underprivileged socio-economically backward families was an important domain of Sahayog’s work.
To ensure participation and to build up social responsibility among the students, Sahayog has formed student action groups in six schools of Sutahata block of East Medinipurknown as ‘ShishuSansad’ (meaning ‘student parliament’ in the local language Bengali). It is basically an action group having four arms headed by a team leader called ‘Pradhan Mantri’ (prime minister).Each arm of this parliament is headed by a leader, called ‘environment minister’ or ‘PoribeshMantri’, ‘healthminister’ or ‘SwasthyaMantri’, ‘educationminister’ or ‘ShikshaMantri’, ‘gamesand sports minister’ or ‘KriraMantri’.
It is expected that each arm will act suitably for the group. For example, the Swasthya Mantri will energize the school students to maintain general hygiene. He and his team will check the body weight, nail and hair-cut of every child weekly. They will monitor the habit of hand-wash, before and after taking midday-meal at the school.
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.
