POKHRAMA FOUNDATION A NJ NONPROFIT CORPORATION
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Mission Statement
The Pokhrama Foundation has, at the present moment, channelized all its energies into establishing an outstanding school in Village Pokhrama, District Lakhisarai, Bihar. The Pokhrama Foundation Academy, as the School is being called, will provide exceptional education to disadvantaged students, with several not having to pay for it. All students, including those who pay some fees, will be subsidised. This short note elucidates the educational vision of the Pokhrama Foundation. Education and schooling are complex subjects. Creating a first-rate educational institution means engaging with numerous theoretical and practical variables and getting their interplay just right. Consequently, any discussion of educational visions runs the risk of looking less than comprehensive. Members of the Foundation have been thinking hard about the matter. We at the Foundation believe such visions are always in the making; they never appear to be fully made. Our vision will remain in-the-making for years to come, well beyond take-off. Therefore, we place below some key ideas that inform it as of now. First, our children would feel happy to attend school, day in and day out. A crucial ingredient of this would be to banish all fear from their minds. Gandhi once said that the greatest gift any person can give fellow humans is the gift of fearlessness: abhayadanam. Pokhrama Foundation Academy shall be a place of abhaya, fearlessness. No violence. No corporal punishment -- none at all. No bossing over children. No intellectual or cultural hierarchies. Children will not fear the Foundation, not their teachers, not other kids. There will be incessant dialogue. It will be open and free. Fear feeds on -- and triggers -- enmity, ego, greed, anger and the like. We hope to train ourselves, our teachers and students to fight these tendencies. In so doing, we hope to create the environment that the founders of our Republic imagined: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls… Fearlessness is a necessary condition for the children to remain happy. But it is not a sufficient one. Other inputs into the children’s happiness include understanding each child, classroom conversations, the whetting of curiosity, equal treatment of all and a genuine engagement with intellectual problems, cultural pursuits and sports. This means education at Pokhrama Foundation Academy would simultaneously involve the head, heart and hand, as Gandhiji had urged. It would seek to create a deep interplay between these – that is, between the cognitive, affective, aesthetic, cultural and physical domains. All of us in the Pokhrama Foundation strongly believe this. An active sense of ‘learning by doing’, grasping several concepts (across the various curricular areas) through practices such as farming will be important for us. Pokhrama Foundation Academy will have a school farm, regularly maintained by children and teachers. The education that Gandhi advocated may be summed up as an ‘education for life, through life’. For him, as for several other educationalists, the contours of life must never remain far from learning. The National Curriculum Framework, 2005 especially emphasizes that education must take place in the context of – and through – issues of daily life. Not only should it introduce the child to the dialectic of theory and practice, it should also be linked to the world of work. We are conscious that crores of Indian parents and children think of education as a surer route of social mobility. There can be no denying that all true education leads to the discovery and refinement of the self, to the intellectual and spiritual flourishing of the individual, yet freedom from poverty and drudgery is a necessary condition of happiness. At the Pokhrama Foundation Academy, education shall equip the child from all possible vantage points – the material, moral, social, cultural, political and spiritual. And the inner spirit that this education helps create shall draw upon the common and joint wisdom of all humankind rather than confine itself to chosen fragments. It may, therefore, be said that this education will prepare the child for life even as it uses the warp and woof of life itself to educate her.
About This Cause
POKHRAMA FOUNDATION works with the hardest-to-reach children, ensuring each of them gets a real chance at shaping their destiny. We ensure excellent education, we work with communities, we bring more girls to the forefront, and we instill the ethic of leadership through service. We are working towards transforming communities one child at a time. We focus on Education, Leadership, Gender Equity, and Sustainability. Education - Pokhrama Foundation works to bring quality education to socially and economically disadvantaged students in rural India. Through our School (Pokhrama Foundation Academy) and our two Learning Centers we reach out to nearly 300 children and their communities. In one of the most developmentally challenged areas in India we are bringing transformative education through an international team of dedicated professionals. The Pokhrama Foundation Academy (PFA) was started in Village Pokhrama, District Lakhisarai, Bihar in 2019. The Academy opened from temporary premises with twenty-seven primary school students and four teachers. Enrichment classes for 23 more students from higher grades were held in the evening. For the very first time in their lives students were exposed to a joyful and fear free learning environment, where all learning started with questions and curiosity. Pokhrama Foundation Academy today operates from a spacious 7-acre campus. The campus has been designed to be environmentally sustainable, and is being landscaped with five hundred different varieties of local trees and shrubs. We have a beautifully designed academic block, a Special Classrooms block (with art and music rooms and science labs), and a residential block for the all-India team of teachers at school. We are working towards building, our library, performing arts hub, and specialized playing facilities for different sports. Leadership - The Foundation is creating leaders of change within their communities through service projects. Without the insulation that privilege brings, our children are daily exposed to and live with the issues, fault lines and injustices of their society. The probing liberal arts education that children receive at Pokhrama Foundation Academy enables them to recognize, understand and critique their own social realities. Alongside the cultivation of an objective, critical intellect, the Foundation and School also promote the ethic of service, which binds the Foundation’s scholars closer to their communities as agents of positive change. On the 6th of December 2021 the Pokhrama Foundation launched its Learning Centre. Pokhrama is part of a wider area that suffers from severe underdevelopment and widespread poverty. Our students are all disadvantaged. Yet, there are degrees of disadvantage even within Pokhrama—depending on the intersection of one or several factors such as relative poverty, caste and gender. The Learning Centre is a community service initiative designed to level the playing field for the most disadvantaged, most-in-need children in and around Pokhrama. The Centre works with kids with little or no school education. It specially reaches out to girl children-- who receive few, if any, resources for their growth in a patriarchy ridden society, and to children from the lowest castes-- in whose families education deficits are often the The Learning Center offers bridge courses that prepare kids for transition into the formal learning environments of schools. 20 student volunteers from PFA (from grades 7 th , 8 th and 9 th) teach 60 kids (ages 6-9) drawn from the local community. Students have been divided into four groups by age and ability, and receive systematic instruction, six times a week, in numeracy and Hindi and English literacy. Student volunteers receive teacher training—they do practice lessons and learn to write lesson plans—before they start teaching at the Centre. Learning objectives and study materials recommended by the CBSE (The national education board in India) are used for each group. Every lesson begins with a roll call and the checking of homework from the previous lesson. Each lesson ends with students receiving homework to practice their concepts and their writing skills. Teachers and assistant teachers of PFA offer guidance to the students’ led effort at the Learning Centre. 60% of the first batch of learners at the Learning Center were placed in full-time regular schools in 2022. The kids at PFA—our changemakers and leaders—are already bringing positive changes to their community! The Pokhrama Club, led by Ms. Bharti Rawat, is a club through which students at the PFA engage with issues concerning the wider community in and around Pokhrama. Classroom discussions and queries often become triggers for community engagement, and since PFA believes in "education for life, through life", taking and trying ideas derived from books and the classrooms to the village and community seems only logical. Thus, in discussing democratic governance, when most sixth graders claimed not to know or understand how or where government worked for them, their Social Studies teacher, Ms. Rawat, decided that a good way to test out how government or governance worked in the locality would be to get students to do a survey of government welfare schemes and their efficacy in Pokhrama and the villages around it. Through a door-to-door survey of 327 households, students collected data that revealed a total of 17 state and central government welfare schemes applicable to the survey area, of which barely 3 or 4 were being utilized by the people of the village. As follow-up steps, students prepared a nukkad naatak (street play) to raise awareness about various welfare schemes that were going unused; they met with the village level elected representative and presented their findings; and wrote about this survey and other local events and happenings in the school newspaper The Pokhrama Herald. Gender Equity- Evening the scales for the girl child in a patriarchal society is hugely transformative. At Pokhrama Foundation we get girls away from homes and into school. Getting them away from homes into schools means getting them away from bone tiring household chores, and the highly likely future of early marriage and motherhood. Women with secondary education could earn twice as much as those with no education says a world bank report from 2018. Girls with education don’t often marry young, they enjoy better personal health, incomes of their own, and likely more of a say in decisions that impact them. They have better lives and build better families around them. Getting girls into schools, nurturing their skills and confidence, and helping them grow into leaders is a key mission of the Pokhrama Foundation. In a poverty ridden society kids are seen as beings with one mouth and two hands: one mouth to feed, two hands to work. Children’s labour is seen as essential to the survival of the family unit. While true for all children of poor families, in a patriarchal society this is much more true for the girl child. Girls look after younger siblings and do mountains of housework while families spend their meagre resources on educating their boys, hoping to give them a future. Girls are expected to go where their destiny takes them. As with many places in India, and indeed the world, this is true for Pokhrama. Educating the girl child is simply not a priority. In such a setting, getting the girl child out to school, takes concerted and consistent effort. Pokhrama Foundation does regular, pointed outreach in the community to convince parents to send their girls to schools. The Foundation has earmarked fifty percent of its scholarship funds for the girl child. This convinces several parents to consider sending their girls to school, enabling many girls in Pokhrama to receive real schooling for the very first time. Women and girls power the Pokhrama Foundation. In the governing body of the Pokhrama Foundation, at the Pokhrama Foundation Academy, the Learning Center, the Pokhrama Club, Pokhrama Herald and the Outreach Center at Hyderabad- women and girls lead, plan and execute. We have strategically started moving towards a more women led organization. In the recently created (September 2022) US Board for Pokhrama Foundation, four out of five board members are women. Two out of the three most significant executive positions in the Pokhrama Foundation are held by women. The Learning Center was conceptualized by our lead teacher--Vaishnavi Mohan, and is run by student-volunteers most of whom are young girls. The Pokhrama Herald and Pokhrama Club are women led projects, and our Outreach Center at Hyderabad is run by two women. Female leadership and initiative is visible and palpable everywhere in the Pokhrama Foundation. Sustainability - At Pokhrama, the ethos of environmental sustainability is translated to the way we build, live, learn, work and play—in harmony with the natural environment. In December 2020, Pokhrama Foundation acquired 7 acres of land to build a spacious, simple, and state-of-the-art campus for its School. We worked with the eminent architect Varun Kohli (New York City) and the architectural firm, AEON (Noida, India) to create an architectural and design blueprint for the school campus with the aim to create a zero-footprint campus To the extent possible the building and campus of PFA have been envisioned as self-reliant especially for energy, water and waste in an environmentally sustainable way. In the absence of any municipal sewer system, the campus is deploying ‘living machines’ or natural bio-filtration systems to treat solid waste. The existing rainwater collection pond on the campus site that has in the past served farmers on this land, will continue to harvest rainwater in the monsoon season and retain it for the drier months. All storm water collected on the site will be channeled to the rainwater pond via naturally designed bio-swales. The water will then be used for irrigation on site.