Debut Activity of our Trust

The initial thought on ‘Giving back to society’ was disseminate by my friends Madhu and Gokul three years back, since then we were planning to do some social activities specifically targeting school children. Recently we had debut activity of our trust and in this post I would like to share my experience and learning through this activity

One fine evening I got call from my friend Mohan babu and he asked me ‘Why don’t we plan our Trust’s debut activity this month’, immediately I started giving him number of reasons to convey that will not possible. But he persistently motivated me to take up this challenge. At this time Mohan’s friend Ravi Kiran also joined his hands for this activity which enhanced our confidence to take this up. Mohan recommended one Government school near HAL aerospace division; we found this school to be suitable for our debut activity.

For few days we were discussing about what we can contribute to the students, starting from notebooks we list down many things and took this to head master of the school. To our surprise all these basic amenities were already provided to students by other philanthropic group. Then we realized that our thoughts are too narrowed down to help students and forget to analyze the real need of students. So we decided to go and understand the present need of the students. This is a real eye opener for us, our perception changed from helping students to fulfilling their needs. Though I had encountered many situations in my work to think from customer shoes it took a short time to apply this in real life situation.

Our next discussion with head master went very well because we were completely open to understand their needs. Finally we came to know that sweater is the current need to the school to make students to come to school on cold days. Mohan and Ravi started getting quotation for 100 sweaters, our initial quotations that we got from Sivaji nagar was disappointing as the estimated cost was two times than what we had at our hands. But we decided not to compromise on quality at any cost, so thought of giving one more try at different shops at service road. And this time we were able to get them with reasonable price with same quality.

So we are all set to distribute sweaters to 100 students from class one to seven on Aug 5^th. We didn't plan on how to distribute them to students but then head master already arranged for a small event for this distribution. We were very happy to see the commitment of teachers and head master to channel the facilities to their students. Since we are not familiar with Kannada we were not able to interact with students but then we were happy that educational officer who came for that event conveyed the message to young sparks that we had in our mind on that day.