Vanavil Trust

The Trust operates a school for children of the marginalised nomadic community. The school supports education from pre-nursery to the fifth grade and features activity-based and experiential education.

Besides providing academic inputs the school also supports extracurricular activities such as arts and performances, animal farm visits, clay model-making sessions and conducting school plays to ensure all-round development.

To enable the nomadic women with their livelihoods, the Trust, in partnership with Ashwini Seetha Foundation, helped create self-help groups to provide financial support and encourage these women to turn into small traders. It has also offered milch cows to single women besides training in tailoring and power machine operation to younger women.

The Vanavil Children’s Home accepts children from single parents, those having family issues and the homeless to keep them from resorting to begging and falling prey to child marriage. The children are provided with food, shelter, regular health checkups and also trained in vocational crafts such as tailoring, basket weaving and palm crafts. It also runs online classes for the children in partnership with CLE Trust, Bangalore.

The Trust supports minority and nomadic children to pursue higher education by providing them with scholarships. The students are given career guidance and admissions are facilitated through mentors who also act as local guardians and help the students. The scholarships cover hostel and fees expenses.

Vanavil Trust runs eleven after-school centres in different localities of the Nagapattinam and Thiruvarur districts. Children attending these centres are supported in learning their school lessons and provided with healthy snacks.

School attendance is regularly monitored and children who fall into child labour are convinced to rejoin school and continue their studies. Through sports day activities and career camps, the students in higher grades are counselled to pursue higher education.

Vanavil After-school centres provide educational and nutritional support to school-going children in the nomadic tribal hamlets

Vanavil School provides primary education through an alternative school and nutritional to children from nomadic tribal and other underserved communities.