The kids from Makkala Jagriti are a little late - the Dream-a-Dream bus has picked them up from their school and tackled heavy Bangalore city traffic to bring them over to the Sports Academy. But when they arrive there is a flurry of reunion - kids meeting each other, colour jerseys and football studs being worn, boys and girls ready for the match - everyone excited to be outdoors, playing. The youngest child is around 6 years old all the way to senior kids from grades 8, 9 and above. The children are separated by height and age - and smaller teams are created. Each group then goes into a separate part of the field to warm up under the guidance of the team of coaches.
Ajit Gupta - the head Coach of the SPT Football programme tells me he is really excited to be doing these sessions. His team also runs 'regular' sessions each weekend where eager parents from in and around Bangalore bring their children in for Football Coaching. But Coach Ajit says working with the kids from Dream-a-Dream is energizing. The children are eager, very ready to be coached and wanting to learn and use every minute of the time they have on the field.
The senior children are formed into two teams and the rules are laid down for the match - boys and girls form part of each team. The coach tells me that the number of girls has been steadily increasing. The game gets under way - and gets into a heated mode real soon. By half time one side is clearly ahead - the other team is dejected. The coach huddles the team - and teaches them to deal with the frustration of loosing and convert it into strategy for the next half.
This is truly a life skills session. None of this can be taught in the regular academic classes. And without the support from Dream-a-Dream, the children from Ananya and Makkala Jagriti would not really have a chance to learn these critical skills of life survival - through such a fun and engaged excercise.
These life skills have the capacity of being a great leveler between regular and 'underprivileged' children. Vishal Talreja, the young CEO of the organization passionately believes in that possibility. At the end its about how well you can deal with issues, problems, situations in life - and the programmes run by his team focus on helping build that capacity through co-curricular activities.
Covering a key area of skill building their work focuses on the critical portion of the gap between an underprivileged child and his/ her ability to work with equal opportunities.
Working across several partners in Bangalore who work with underprivileged children, D-a-D is now looking to scale up their work and are struggling to determine if the scale that they want to achieve should be in terms of deeper impact or more numbers covered - or both? Given that this is a critical need area. That triggered the discussion and work with Innovation Alchemy.
They have built an amazing network of volunteers who come together to support the various activities and programmes. A small core team manages the operations and works through partner organizations and volunteers to reach over 2000 children in Bangalore. That's not a small number considering each child is in atleast one activity each week of the academic year.
As the Dream-a-Dream core Team came together last month for a 'scale-architecture' session, clearly the idea they have experimented with and fine tuned incredibly over the last 7-8 years is powerful, the operations are effective - and now its time to potentially reach 500,000 children in the next 5 years! Through a whole new service model leveraging Learning Skills Experts. The thought of being able to do that has energized the team! With a powerful fund raising base, D-a-D hopes to increase its reach and impact significantly - and also go beyond Bangalore and Mysore soon...
You can support their work by running in the Mumbai Marathon coming January. Infact you will find Dream-a-Dream at some of the biggest marathons across India, being supported by a bevy of volunteers who enjoy raising funds and giving time to this project...
