Change is hard. But change is good.
As we confidently look towards Phase 2, good things are brewing at Saamuhika Shakti with two new partners charged up to join this four-year-old collective - Sparsha Trust and Udhyam Learning Foundation.
While Sparsha will look towards addressing the access to quality education needs of children from the waste picker families, Udhyam Learning Foundation’s Vyapaar vertical will focus on supporting the more than 200 waste entrepreneurs created in Phase 1 to become sustainable and grow their business.
Sparsha Trust, founded in 2005 by five master's degree holders in Social Work (MSW), is a registered charitable Trust with a vision to create a society free of exploitation of children, where young kids are supported to discover their potential and given opportunities for comprehensive development. The Trust has been working in the four main areas –
The Trust has built two childcare institutions for underprivileged children and operates 48 mobile creches for children of construction workers, which have nurtured more than 13,000 and 1,500 children, respectively, catering to their nutritional, educational, skill-related, physical, and moral needs. With an objective to create a child-friendly infrastructure along with teachers’ training & community engagement, the Trust adopted and supported 11 model schools and 170 model Anganwadis. The Trust also focuses on the skill development of children, youth, and women, and the nutritional development of lactating and pregnant women.
In the Saamuhika Shakti collective, with the collaborative support from government departments and partners, Sparsha Trust aims to work on the educational needs of children from waste picking families in the areas of:
The project is designed to serve the comprehensive development (Care, Protection, and Development) of children aged 0-18 years in 40 slums along with 35 Government schools and 35 Anganwadi Centers and in Bengaluru. The intervention will create a strong foundational learning and child-friendly environment in the community, schools and Anganwadis with long-term beneficial effects. Sparsha will also embark on building a supportive and healthy environment and ecosystem for parents and the community in tending to the development of the children.
Udhyam Vyapaar is one of two verticals of Udhyam Learning Foundation, and aims to bring alive its mission “Making Bharat Entrepreneurial'' among nano-entrepreneurs. Udhyam Vyapaar works with existing entrepreneurs (Vyapaaris) who are essentially necessity entrepreneurs, earning on an average less than INR 25,000 a month. Udhyam Vyapaar helps these Vyapaaris scale their businesses, make them successful in life, and move them towards their highest human potential.
Udhyam Vyapaar’s long term vision is to make nano-entrepreneurship a profitable and respectable profession, and thus providing an avenue for people to become proud job-creators instead of job-seekers.
With Saamuhika Shakti, Udhyam will work with the ~200 entrepreneurs created during Phase 1 from among the waste pickers. As the first step, the team will delve deep into the lives of these entrepreneurs to identify bottlenecks they face in running their enterprises. The team will then, jointly with the entrepreneur’s ecosystem, ideate to create solutions to the identified problems as well as unlock growth opportunities, thus setting them up for greater profitability, scale and efficiency. The key outcomes targeted are two-fold:
Udhyam Vyapaar currently works with entrepreneurs in urban and rural areas, across multiple business segments like ironing vendors, food street vendors, home based food businesses, tailors, small cloth shops, and many more. While working with entrepreneurs of each business segment, a unique business-specific solution matrix is created across sourcing, market linkage, product and processes. This ever-evolving solution matrix accelerates the process of solution identification when working with other entrepreneurs from the same business segment.
