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Every dark cloud has a silver lining

It was a friday morning in the month of February 2019. Madhu and I were scheduled to visit a partner in Bengaluru. We had, just the day before visited the school of Hippocampus foundation – DKS Hippocampus school in Halasahalli, Karnataka. It was a hectic two day trip. The second day started at 7:30 am, with me desperately trying to book an Uber to reach the partner in the other part of Bengaluru from where I was staying. After several minutes of waiting and cancellations I finally got on the cab. The next pain started with the crazy traffic in Bengaluru. In my mind I was cursing the traffic and the busy city of Bengaluru. To keep myself busy, I started reading news and the news of 40 jawans killed in  a terrorist bomb attack in Pulwama, Kashmir (the day before) greeted me. The news once more reminded me of the fact that there are so many who face actual adverse conditions in life. 

Madhu and her niece Apurva joined me at the Hippocampus office in the morning. With the news still playing in my mind, all three of us reached Madiwala, Bengaluru  to visit the Government Observation Home for Boys. It was a nondescript building completely secured.

 An Observation Home is the first stop for troubled children who get into  conflict with the law. 

We went inside and were greeted by Ms Kalpana Purushothaman, who had invited us to visit the facility, as we had supplied books to them to start a reading center / library for the youth present in the building( in 2018). A brief background on Ms Kalpana Purushothaman -> She is a member of the Juvenile Justice Board and is part of the Judicial bench, a three member panel, who adjudicate cases of children in conflict with the law (both boys and girls) brought from all across Bangalore (Urban) district. She is someone  with a passion to bring in some positive changes to the home and brighten the lives of the boys housed in there. She believes in bringing a positive atmosphere and light in the lives of the boys, even though it’s a facility that reminds one of darkness. We were also introduced to Dr. Kamalavva, Superintendent of the Observation Home who is with these boys day in and day out handling the very many issues. A young mother herself, with a PhD in Human Development, she works tirelessly to bring hope and cheer to the lives of the children in her care.

Harini, Madhu, Kalpana & Kamalavva

Ms. Kalpana, Dr Kamalavva and the staff keep looking for ways to bring a positive atmosphere, cheer and hope amongst the boys housed in there.

After our discussion we were led on a tour of the facility. Indeed it was out of the box thinking of the team to provide for the boys with some space to play a sport they enjoy, within the constraints present (that prohibit them from going outside the facility to play). An indoor basketball court in a room inside the facility.

Then we were led to the reading room. Our eyes brightened to see the books from Joy of Reading lined up in the shelves neatly. The reading room had chairs and tables and looked like any other library.

  • JoR Books lined in shelf
  • The chairs are old vehicle tires painted by the boys

The boys had decorated the walls with their paintings. The room resembled just any other regular library outside and the feeling that it was inside a secured campus was not there. The Open Learning Space created with the help of Headstreams along with the boys looked warm and inviting.  

  • Paintings done by the boys themselves

We did get a chance to meet the boys present in the facility, who were participating in a workshop that involved expressing their thoughts through painting. The session was led by a dance and movement facilitator Lakshmi . The theme that day was “What made them feel safe?”

  • One boy had expressed that he felt most safe with his parents and had drawn a beautiful picture with a child holding the hands of 2 elders.
  • Another boy had drawn a picture where he expressed that he felt safe with his elder brother and told us, that had his brother been there he would have never ended up here.
  • Another boy had drawn his house and implied that his safe environment was his house.

We couldn’t take pictures in this room due to privacy reasons – but I remember these paintings even though its close to 6 months since I visited. These were boys who were 15 or 16 or 17 years but these paintings made us realize that they were just children. Their paintings depicting the safe environment stirred up too many emotions. These were children who committed mistakes due to not receiving proper guidance/education or by just being in the wrong environment or company. Yet amongst all these, we were glad that they had some light in the dark tunnel they were navigating – thanks to Kalpana, Dr Kamalavva and the staff there, who encourage these interactions..

Lakshmi was close to ending the session, and she played a song and asked the boys to dance. Some of them were shy, but some were very enthusiastic and gave us some good bollywood dance moves. They cheered Kalpana to join them, who shook a leg enthusiastically.

Lakshmi mentioned that the boys had told her that they loved the library and it was a refuge for them during their down times.  We silently high fived in our minds, for making a small impact in the lives of these children.

We had given a book on Clifford and one of the boys had drawn Clifford so beautifully from the book which we had donated. It struck a chord and touched us that these books helped in some way – thanks to countless donors who had given the books to us.

Two hours had flown past just like that. It was time to take leave. Kalpana requested us to see if anyone could volunteer to do reading sessions with the children there during the library hours.

If you are in Bengaluru and can spare an hour once a week or once every 2 weeks, please get in touch with us. We will guide you on what needs to be done at the Government Observation Home for Boys, Madiwala. 

Email: joyofreadingus@gmail.com

With a myriad of emotions running in our minds we took leave. Our hearts felt heavy but there was a silver lining – there are so many people working in making life much better on this earth. We have miles to go but so glad that we embarked on this journey. The day started in one way and ended up giving us a real time view of those really facing tough situations and reinforcing us on our mission to make a difference however small it maybe. Thanks to everyone who is supporting us on making this journey possible.

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The Sarva Vidya Experiment

It was 2017 close to the festival of Deepavali or the festival of lights. I had gone to Chennai to celebrate the festival with family. At this time we also had a load of books that were dropped from the US to Chennai, due to some good samaritan agreeing to carry the books from USA. I had to pick them up and take it with me to Hyderabad or think about organisations at Chennai itself. As this was happening, Sarva Vidya  caught our spotlight. Sarva Vidya is a trust that empowers the girl child through its nursing diploma program and also conducts after school classes for children in various grades. The trust itself sits at the Sarada Vidyalaya school run by the Ramakrishna Mutt – a local language medium school. The school and the trust have a good connection and the after school programs of Sarva Vidya run at the school as well. The headmistress of the after school program Ms. Namagiri,  Ms. Thenmozhi of Sarva Vidya , Mr CSRaghunathan one of the early founders and board member of Sarva Vidya and I met at Mr Raghunathan’s house. We discussed on the importance of reading and how to inculcate the same amongst children at an early stage. At this time the concept of Joy of Reading hour popped up. The discussion then proceeded to how we could implement it at Sarada Vidyalaya. No plan was made but agreed that we should start it at some point of time. Fate smiled at us and we had Ms. Ranjani Raghu interested in the Joy of Reading concept and decided to volunteer for the same. Everything seemed to fall in line. And thus the Joy of Reading journey started in Sarada Vidyalaya. Ranjani started visiting the school twice a week to conduct the JoR hour. Her routine was to read the  various story books present to children. The school is primarily a Tamil language medium school. However, small English stories were read and the children ended up learning new words. Often some activities around the story was also conducted as to who can repeat the story and what new words have been learnt etc.  

The reading of the story along with explanation in Tamil

Interactive session where meaning of new words learnt are asked of the children 

Ranjini : I am a part of Joy Of Reading program for the past one year, where I was reading story books for children of classes 4th and 5th in Ramakrishna mission, Sarada middle school in Chennai. It was a very nice experience. Children was so excited to listen to the stories by which they also learnt a few english words. They all enjoyed the session and were always waiting for the next session to come. Some children who did not open up in the beginning also started to participate at the end of the year. Overall it was an enjoyable experience for both me and the children

Ranjani during a JoR session at Sarada Vidyalaya

JoR Hour is a a volunteer run program. JoR is always on the look out for volunteers to help conduct the JoR hour in schools of its various partners. Ping us if you are interested. 

Thanks to Ranjani, the JoR hour at Sarada Vidyalaya has been running successfully for the past one year.  Here are some testimonials from some kids in the school after a year of the program

Kamalesh talking about his jolly experience in JoR Hour. He loved the Tenali Raman story and the peacock story. And learning new English words makes him feel good

Nisha from the 5th grade tells that she loves learning English through her story teacher & stories

A whole bunch of children treat it as a great platform to gain proficiency in English language and find the the story hour great fun which is different than their usual routine. As and when we find volunteers we want to scale the concept to other schools that we partner with as well. Stay tuned for the next experiment we are conducting at Sarva Vidya – to level and measure the reading level of children

Till then its Au revoir !

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The wheels of the bus go round and round

India Literacy Project (ILP) : Our partner in mobility !

It was December and Hyderabad turns a tad bit chilly – a good time to visit the city as  the weather is pleasant. Madhu was visiting India for the holiday season.  In between her family visits , was a trip to the India Literacy Project office as well.  India Literacy Project is one of our initial partners . WE have an association that has spanned over years and we have supplied them books on and off through the years. The ILP Hyd chapter head Mr. Manmohan has helped us through many of our questions while we have discussed several rounds of how literacy worked in India. During the December of 2016 when Madhu was here, she and I went to the ILP office to discuss how to take the partnership further. It was at this time that ILP was figuring out how to move with their second mobile library van up and running. End result – Joy of Reading ended up sponsoring a mobile library van (thanks to Madhu and Joy of Reading US which sent funds to ILP India directly and JoR India helped with the books).

The mobile library sessions by ILP are similar to the Joy of Reading Hour. An ILP employee visits 2 schools per day distributing books as well as conducting various activities during the library hour and helping the children to read. 

So on one cold wintry morning in Hyderabad close to Chandanagar area at the Mpp School both JoR and ILP formally inaugurated the joint mobile library van. 

Needless to say, the children were very excited about their school being included and got the first set of books to read that day.

After a year here are some statistics from ILP on the mobile library 

Mobile Library data: 
Schools :  6 schools 
Students: 388
Sessions : 61 sessions (July to November 15th)
Books distributed: 1194 

Reading levels as per pre – assessments : 
Level 1 – 163
Level 2 – 33
Level 3 – 7 .
Level 4 – 6
Level 0 – 179 (Beginners)

Thank you ILP . Looking forward to more such lovely initiatives in the future. 

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How did we start to level our books and our partnership with Hippocampus

Hippocampus

Our library in India is a basement at Madhu’s parents house in Kalyan Nagar, Hyderabad. It contained more than 10000 books that were shipped over the years. We were supplying books to schools based on our scheme of levelling books of increasing difficulty. They were graded level 1 to level 6. There was no standard algorithm there but based on the experience gained. We ran our library  (and infact still run) using the help of very many volunteers either part of friends or family. With a varied combination of help, the organisation and sorting of the books was not the best as there was not a perfect algorithm in sorting the books. When schools asked for books a mixed supply of books were donated based on the understanding of requirement qualitatively.  The other thing that we also noticed is that since our target beneficiaries were government schools and organisations with children run by non profits, these children were from a low income background whose experience with the English language was still in the nascent stages. At this stage we were thinking what would be the best books to send to schools and if there is a standard way we could follow to send books to school that will help improve their reading experience. At this time we visited our partner India Literacy Project (ILP) and were interested to learn that they have books sorted based in the GROW BY Reading program from Hippocampus.in. We got an understanding what this means exactly. The details of the program can be read here @ GrowByReading The GROW BY reading program by Hippocampus
focusses on increasing reading levels irrespective of the grade a child belongs to. It has helped work in rural areas and for children studying in non-English medium schools. It’s a levelling solution that levels both children and books and matches them, and progresses irrespective of the  grade level of a child. This system was mainly targeted at schools run in rural Karnataka where mostly the children are the first generation to be exposed to English. It seemed logical and we heard success tories both from ILP and Hippocampus (later)  themselves. From then on JoR shifted to the GROW BY Levelling system .

This was also the juncture where we were wondering how we could get in touch with the organisation Hippocampus themselves and we did soon get an opportunity. As we were put in touch to supply books to Remand Home Bengaluru under the Govt of Karnataka we got the introduction to the founder of Hippocampus Umesh ! They were interested in our partnership and we supplied in May 2018 a total of  2500 books of all levels for their newly started primary schools in Karnataka, India.

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Crowdsourcing Help through Volunteers – Our Modus Operandi

A common question in many a persons mind when they hear about a non profit organisation is how are operations run?  Its a valid concern and question for anyone who is a donor to the organisation. Here we would like to give you some insights into our model of operation.

@USA

Our books are largely sourced from the USA . They are procured through very many book donation drives. Books from USA form more than 90% of our inventory.   As an organisation we strongly believe in recycling and reusing.

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.

Books can never be trash but simply one outgrows them and moves onto the next set. But there will be 1000s more who can be benefitted by the book.  That has been our first principle – how can we reuse the treasure spread across the world. Do we need to buy books or can we reuse them – many a times we have seen people donating books to other children when their own have outgrown. The books that come to us are in good condition though they have been donated.

The first step: Donation drives

These donation drives are done by the 3 main trust members in the USA board namely Madhu, Yogita and Stephanie. Each of them enlist the help of friends to volunteer to help with the donation drives . These donation drives happen at schools or communities or work places or sometimes book stores donate them, Very seldom have we bought books and it happens maybe at half price sales.  Here is a sample of our donation drive which gets heavily advertised on all forms of social media, email  as well as word of mouth.

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 The second step: First level of sorting and boxing

The books need to be then sorted into their respective categories . This is once more a volunteer driven operation headed by our board members in the USA. It also takes place in Madhu’s house, founding member of JoR. Help for this is crowdsourced as well and friends sign up for the same. here is a sample of how its advertised

Its made into a fun activity for both adults and children and is fondly referred to as a book sorting party – indeed its a party for book lovers who just go through several thousands of books and organising into their categories . Check out where both our youth and adult volunteers helping us out with a sorting event.

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The third step : Shipping to India

Once again volunteers are sourced for trasnferring books from America to India. People relocating to India who hire a container help us in carrying 1000s of books. There are also people who keep shuttling between Hyderabad (our base in India) and Seattle (our base in the USA) as part of business trips. We make them carry one suitcase of books.  Till date we haven’t spent any money for transferring books overseas. It has been the goodwill of several of friends and acquaintances who have helped us in this good cause.

@INDIA

The fourth step: Sorting and levelling in India

In India once the boxes are transferred to our library at Kalyan Nagar, Hyderabad . Once again through help of volunteers the levelling (using Grow by Reading) , sorting and accounting of books happen. The novels are further classified based on authors or series type. Reference books are classified into Animals, Space, Geography, English, Math, Magazines, Management etc. The volunteer help is sourced through word of mouth by the India board member. Both children and adults help with the whole process.

The fifth Step: Shipping to recipients

We have to ship cartons to places outside of Hyderabad for which we need help in shifting the boxes and packing and actual shipping. This is where we spend money to pack and ship it to send it to the interiors of various states. At times we ask our own partners to bear the bill or we go ahead and bear it at our end.

These form our bulk of operations where we use the help of volunteers mainly. Our main costs include the hire of a part time as and when needed manual labor to help us with the cleanliness and maintenance of the library in India, auditor costs for help with filing taxes and printing our stationery (such as labels and receipt books and those with the upkeep of our money in bank). But as we increase the size of our operation we have to rethink our strategy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hello book lovers!

Welcome to our world of Joy of Reading. We are a  bunch of book lovers passionate about reading and derive immense pleasure from the same. We are those who first look for a library in a city when we move in newly.  Over time as we discovered our shared passion we decided why not spread the same joy to every one across the world. Madhulika Gadde was the first one to hit on this scheme and started the journey of collecting books from several of her friends in USA  and providing with a large treasure of books to begin the journey.

Our presence currently is in USA and India. Our mission is to

Enable every child to immerse in the world of books anytime anywhere.

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To this effect we have been donating books to schools and organisations which do not have the luxury or budget to invest in a good set of books. At Joy of reading we believe Book’s are a child’s best friend. In the formative years it takes the child into a realm of imagination that provides with immense joy. It helps the child to create, imagine, and the confidence to explore. A child never feels alone once they get into the habit of reading and it is said that a child who extensively reads is more successful in future

Our aim is to make sure that every child in any corner of the world  gets access to books whenever they want.

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We have miles to go but we have started our journey in a small way . We look forward to all your support to help us in our journey either by donating books or your time or your money. We will share our stories from our journey giving insights into our world. We welcome your suggestions and feedback to make us more successful in our endeavour.