IAYP’s Community Service Projects Have Made Us Empathetic

The following report has been submitted by Shubhra Jain, an Award participant from Uttam School for Girls, who narrates her experience of a community service project to be undertaken as part of the Award Programme. She highlights how it helped her and her fellow participants grow.

I believe that IAYP’s community service projects aim not just at building strong and self-reliant communities but also empathetic individuals who endeavour to create a better society. As part of one such community service project, a number of Award participants from our school, Uttam School for Girls, organised a fund-raiser talent show to support the students of Sewa Samarpan Vidyamandir – a school that aims at educating the children belonging to economically disadvantaged sections of society.

We toiled to make the event a huge success. We prepared posters and put them up in the corridors of our school to promote the event. Teams were prepared that coordinated with teachers and looked after the discipline and finance. Also, we made entry tickets out of old used paper and an entry fee of ₹10 was charged from those who witnessed the show. Our students gave enthralling performances; while some delivered commendable dance performances, and some left the audience spellbound with their melody in singing. Not only these, the participants also performed a magic show and a street play depicting the plight of beggars in our country. To mollify the atmosphere were some funny ‘shayaris’ that appealed greatly to the audience.

Our skills and efforts bore fruit when an amount of ₹6500 was successfully collected through the fund raiser. With some part of the amount, we purchased textbooks which were distributed among the students of Grade VI and VII of Sewa Samarpan Vidyamandir, while the remaining amount was used for purchasing 28 metres of cloth with which the students of Sewa Samarpan Vidyamandir created exquisite shopping bags to be used in place of polythene bags. This activity helped the students there to acquire a new skill for a lifetime.

'No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.' In the process of raising funds for the students at Sewa Samarpan Vidyamandir, we developed a sense of empathy and understanding – values that will guide us in our stride of bringing about a change in the world.