The Amma Social Welfare Association (ASWA)

Supported by: Wipro

About ASWA

The Amma Social Welfare Association (ASWA) based in Hyderabad started with the belief that “All beings are interdependent, interrelated, and serving other human beings and society is not a favour! It is our responsibility”.  After a decade of selfless work in implementing various service programs like blood donation drives, financial support to poor students, food distribution, relief activities, awareness programs in schools and others, we realised that we need to work with the system to address the root causes of the problems in society and education. ASWA started working on the critical levers of the social change that have high potentials to transform the present situation.

Projects

Three main efforts under primary education are listed below:

1. From 2018 onwards, Wipro Fellowship’s financial support and academic guidance enabled us to work towards strengthening primary school education by improving language and literacy initiatives. As the children of the government primary school, where Haritha (Wipro Fellow) works, were not attending school due to pandemic and not able to cope-up with online classes, Children Learning Center (CLC/Project Vikas) was initiated in October 2020. Through this, children were engaged with the process of learning and it helped develop their language, literacy, and numeracy competencies. The target group was underprivileged Children in Ram Nagar slum area. At present, 24 children aged 3-13 years are attending our Learning Center for two hours every day. A volunteer teacher has been recruited with nominal honorarium to sustain this activity. The CLC helps in engaging children even when the school is not running. It prevents dropouts, generates curiosity in children, and facilitates their learning process. Many heart-warming stories of these children motivate the fellow to continue this.
2. We are very happy to reach out and contribute to parents, teachers, NGOs, and others with 39 weekly online library sessions covering concepts, elements, and activities of a library (like, vibrant library, role of libraries and storytelling, collection, display, book borrowing, book caring, read aloud, book talk etc.) with a special focus on children literature. On an average, about 10 participants from Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gurgaon, London, and Kuwait have participated. Participants (parents) are able to introduce books to their children and other children.
3. Another successful offshoot of the library sessions is the weekly online Children Story Time. A total of 29 sessions are held. On an average, 7-9 children aged 4-15 years participated. Each session was moderated by Haritha or a volunteer. Emphasis was given to encourage children to read storybooks, express their thoughts and ideas, think critically, narrate, visualise, read, and question.

Under the wellbeing initiatives (CHDHC) started in 2018 to promote harmonious living in the society and Universal Human Values Education in the higher education institutions (NITs, AICTE colleges, UGC affiliated colleges), 14 online workshops, 75 webinars (390 hours) for teachers, faculty, students, and people from different walks of life have been organized. There are remarkable life-altering stories from participants. About 7000 participants attended these programs. The credit goes to the team and strength of UHV content. This is also a story of opportunity in a crisis. Workshops also helped take care of relationships and mental health issues that may arise due to pandemic. The impact of the initiative at an individual level is transformation into balanced individuals, evolving into a much better version of them, not reacting to situations but responding to them in a responsible manner. Medium of the workshop was both English and Telugu. Hence, the reach of the content includes about 10 states in India and about 10 countries over 4 continents.

In spite of unexpected challenges, restrictions, uncertainties of the pandemic, we could stretch ourselves in all possible ways to serve humanity in multiple forms. From April 2020 onwards, ASWA volunteers provided rapid support to emergencies like food items shortage, plasma shortage, and blood shortage. We were able to extend relief support to 207 families, conducted 3 blood camps and collected 98 units of blood for thalassemia patients, and arranged plasma/blood to at least 2-3 emergency cases per day. We have also adopted 38 families in a slum to provide the necessary support for their survival.

Plan for the next 1-3 years

Our understanding about various educational, operational, and organisational matters improved significantly and we were able to plan, design, facilitate and evaluate our initiatives, and work towards a desirable impact in spite of challenges of pandemic. Particularly, well-being (CHDHC) initiatives propelled the ASWA to expand the breadth and depth of its services.

With this confidence, in the next three years, ASWA will focus on the scaling-up of the activities of primary education (language, library, literacy, and numeracy) and cater to the 10 primary schools within the Shadnagar area. This includes handholding the teachers with a personal coaching approach.

Further, we are planning to expand CLC programs to a full-fledged Virtual Teacher Learning Center (vTLC) to take literacy and library related initiatives to both the Telugu state teachers. This will also involve collaboration with like-minded people, NGOs, Schools, and government bodies.

In the domain of holistic education, we are planning to reach many faculties in higher educational institutions and the public by conducting various levels of Wellbeing workshops.

We also aim to translate and publish required knowledge resources related to language, library, and wellbeing programs.