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We engage children and the communities that support and encourage them. Our collaborations across society—households, schools, partner organizations and policymakers—are making a positive difference in children’s lives.
We believe local leadership is essential to the sustainability of our programming. This is why we have supported and worked with local Violence Against Children Prevention Centers as partners in providing response and referral for cases of violence, leading local activism in school-surrounding communities and supporting district education offices in preventing violence in schools.
Working with community-based organizations in this way helps ensure the sustainability of our work and extends the impact and reach of the Good School Toolkit ideas.
Learn about our partners Kaana Foundation and the Foundation for Integrated Rural Development (FIRD)!
Building on a history of drama groups and community engagement, the Good School program developed household and community dialogues—an innovative way of reaching children and their parents amidst COVID-19 restrictions.
When schools closed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were separated from their learners and their links with the community narrowed. We’ve trained over 900 (and counting!) Good School teacher protagonists and members of Good School Parents Committees to conduct household dialogues. We also train local activists using a mobile village cinema (Village Video, or ViVi) to expand our dialogues further.
We’ve engaged 3,700 households in discussions on children’s safety and violence prevention, positive discipline as an alternative to corporal punishment and the importance of children’s mental health.
As more of our work shifts into digital spaces, our activism has shifted with it. We partnered with Grey Chain to develop a comprehensive mobile application to support activists in preventing violence in their schools and communities using the Good School Toolkit.
The app contains several “mini-modules” to build knowledge of key violence prevention concepts, monitoring tools to track the progress of Toolkit implementation, discussion boards to link activists and exchange ideas, and a wealth of materials to lead dialogues on violence prevention topics.
Download the app here!
Everyone has been deeply affected by the COVID-19 crisis, including teachers, learners and our partners across the country. In the spirit of solidarity, Raising Voices extended ongoing financial support to those who contracted COVID-19 as well as those whose close relatives were severely impacted.
We maintained monthly facilitation for 40 regional resource persons and Violence Against Children Prevention Center staff, providing critical financial support. These resources were used for meeting family obligations amidst school closures and for conducting their own community outreach to mitigate the increased risk of violence against children. We also sourced a professional consultant to lead group therapy sessions in order to boost mental health and encourage our partners to support the mental health of others.
We as children now have a collective voice. …We [are] no longer scared to ask teachers [what we want] for fear that we will be abused or [that the] teacher will say no. We have come to realize that the teachers are now highly concerned and respond to us; they are no longer as tough as they were before.