Sarthak Yellow Rooms
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Sarthak Yellow Rooms
“Yellow Rooms are the heart of our work. Situated right in the middle of the community, the Yellow Rooms work for years and become engines of transformation. We think that Yellow Rooms are magic.”
For the last 10 years Sarthak Foundation has been running an intensive, in-depth and long term intervention in the poorest urban slums of UP. We establish permanent safe spaces called Yellow Rooms in the heart of urban slums and rural poor communities. Each Yellow Rooms setup comprises two rooms painted bright yellow. We place two permanent Educators there who spend 6 hours each, every day, all year round, for years in the Yellow Rooms. The aim of this immersive project is to turn children from very marginalised backgrounds into complete and well rounded human beings by taking education and emotional and physical wellness to their doorsteps.
We believe that touch-and-go intervention will have a very limited, if any, impact on the lives of children who need more than ‘education’. Coupled with digital tools, arts, yoga, soft skills and ‘why’ sessions, general knowledge sessions, happiness and gratitude workshops, newspaper reading, children and parent counselling, and many other such tools for marginalised children, our Yellow Rooms are not just ‘education’ centres, but permanent safe spaces against substance abuse, hygiene and health issues, sexual and physical abuse, and emotional and mental health within reach.
Sarthak Yellow Rooms are completely free of cost for the children and the community. We run the following programmes:
- SEPEt (Social Emotional, Physical and Ethical Wellbeing) curriculum focuses on the all round development of the children. As Part of SEPEt, we covers topics such as-
- Values, Behaviour and Civic Sense
- Gender Rights and Social Issues
- Life Skills and Corporate Exposures
- Food & nutrition, Clothes and Counselling
- Community Outreach Workshops and Distribution Drives
2. STEEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Expressions, Arts and Mathematics) Children gain knowledge about the following topics through books, digital media, and hands-on experiments:
- Linguistic, Communication
- Numeracy and Scientific Skills
- Digital Learning
- Art, Craft, Music, Dance
- Indoor Games and Outdoor Sports
3. Sarthak School Inclusion Scholarship raises funds to get these children admitted to better private schools. To empower them, we also fund their college education
4. Skill and Empower (STEP–Sarthak Training and Empowerment Program)
Yellow Room provides digital literacy, computer training and vocational skills to children in classes 11th and 12th. The aim is to provide them with employability skills. As part of this programme, children are trained in:
- Practical working of Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel
- Concept of Computer Course (CCC) - mandatory for government jobs.
The impact of our work has been life-altering, with dramatic improvement in areas like parent-child relationships, instances of domestic violence and children entering crime, community cleanliness, access to government schemes and entitlements. We reduce school dropout to almost 0%. Moreover, instances of girls getting married in early teenage years become rare, and girls’ school attendance improves significantly.
We currently run 20 Yellow Rooms in 4 districts of UP and have close to 2200 children, 56% of these are girls.
