Raise Them Up

Our organisation, Nav-Jeevan Sanstha, was started in 2003 by Iris Wilkinson (now aged 92) with the intention of starting a daycare centre for neglected children living in the slums. The children living in slums are seriously malnourished with no one to take proper care of the children. Often these children go into begging, theft and other sorts of petty crimes. We bring such children to our centre to give them proper love and care, food and educate them about the basics of life and to make them better human beings. Within a short while, that need had become a mid-day meal plus education, then dormitory facilities, to (finally) a full-fledged school and a live-in hostel.

Today, 150 children are housed in the hostel while over 200 commutes from home on a daily basis. We feed and ferry all of them in our own buses. Aside from regular education, we teach them our principles of being good human beings, tolerant of all and accepting of more ways of looking at life than their own, including religion. Our aim is to educate street children and help them create a better life for themselves, ultimately creating a better society. We ensure that the children housed in our hostel will never go to bed with an empty stomach. Our aim is to admit more and more street children into our hostel and give them proper food, accommodation and education. We need support from people in our journey to make a better society.

With support from people and institutions, we proudly say that Navjeevan Sanstha has changed the lives of many children. We often enrol these children for further education until they stand on their own feet. We now have 3 slum children studying for nursing education, one girl started her graduation course in commerce, one boy was admitted for his engineering and another slum boy has completed his graduation and currently preparing for banking exams. We aim to bring a broader impact in society by educating more and more children

About the Beneficiary Organisation

NAVJEEVAN SANSTHA

Nav-Jeevan Sanstha is a non-profit organization established in 2003 for the care and education of street, slum and tribal children. We feel orphans are better off than this category of children because there are organizations which look after them. This is not true for street and slum children. Because they have parents Society feels no obligation to protect or provide for them. But this is a very vulnerable section of society. The parent or parents are out all days trying to eke out a living. The child is left to its own device in the shanty they call home or roaming the street. With no adult protection, the child is often a victim of abuse – both physically and sexually. On paper, the child’s name is entered into the Government schools’ rolls. Whenever there is an inspection in the school teachers come into the slums and drag these children into the classrooms but otherwise, no one is bothered. Very often the teachers themselves don’t bother to attend school, happy with the hefty paycheck that the Government gives them.

Nav-Jeevan means New Life. This is exactly what Nav-Jeevan aims at: give the street kids in Nagpur shelter and help them build a new life. They are the children of rag pickers, beggars, brick-bearers and rickshaw drivers. Most of them live in one-parent families and have lost the other parent because of several reasons. They live in slums, left on their own during the long hours when their parent is working. Very often, they are abused by other grown-ups and are exposed to violence when the parent returns home intoxicated (alcohol and/or drugs).