Get involved
A term, not
an afternoon
We ask for two hours a week for four months, and we run a short induction and a background check before you meet a child. That is a lot to ask and it turns away most people who write in, which is the point.
What we need
Four roles,
honestly ranked
Two hours a week, for a term
High needAnyone who can commit four months
Sitting with a group of four or five children on their homework, in a centre, at six in the evening. This is the role we actually need filled and the hardest one to fill, because it asks for the same evening every week rather than a Saturday.
Reading, in Marathi
High needFluent Marathi readers
Reading aloud and listening to children read back, one to one. The children in Classes 1 to 3 who are behind are behind in Marathi, not English, and English volunteers are not short here.
Accounts and audit
Medium needCAs and finance people
Two or three days a year on the books before the audit, and a look over the annual report before it is published. Genuinely valuable and almost nobody offers.
Photography
Medium needPhotographers who work with children
Every photograph on this site is stock. Replacing them with real ones, taken with consent, is a day's work that would change how this whole site reads.
What we say no to
Three things we
will turn down
- A one-off afternoon. Children who are already used to adults disappearing do not need more practice at it.
- A corporate volunteering day where forty people arrive at once. Eleven small rooms cannot absorb it and the children lose an evening of teaching.
- Anything that involves photographing a child before you have met them.
None of that is ingratitude. It is that the cost of a volunteer who leaves after three weeks is paid by a child, not by us.
For companies
CSR, and the
paperwork your
team will ask for
Talk to us in January, not in the last week of March. A project designed against a deadline is a project designed badly, and we would rather take less money for something that works.
Form CSR-1 with the MCA
CSR00000000
The registration number your team needs before routing spend to us.
Quarterly reporting
A utilisation certificate and a project report every quarter, on the format your auditor wants.
Your team is welcome
In small groups, with notice, on a normal evening. Not forty people at once and not on a photography day.
No FCRA
We are not FCRA registered, so foreign-sourced CSR funds are not something we can take. Say so early and save us both the diligence.