By Isha Sheth | Project Leader
These past months were joyful ventures into exciting new creations and feeling the collective enegy.
Constitutional Values:
The 12-member Child Rights Central Committee (CRC), comprising children, youth, parents, and Shaishav staff, met in July, August, and September.
In these meetings, children expressed concerns about growing violence against children through corporal punishment and other protection violations, as well as increasing violent attitudes among children based on
Leadership Camp
A leadership camp was the first venture in this theme. The camp aimed to help children understand the meaning of the Indian Constitution and connect its values to their everyday lives, while building leadership, critical thinking, and a sense of responsibility.
The camp concluded with children collectively beginning to work on a Constitution for the Balsena Sangathan. This activity helped them practice democratic decision making and strengthened their sense of ownership and participation.
This was made the general theme for the Child Rights week celebration in Dediyapada. With a compilation of games, play, movie and song the values of fraternity, non-violence, humanity was celebrated and discussed.
During the Child Rights Week (14th to 20th November), in Bhavnagar, 12 schools were visited, reaching 3,057 students and 51 teachers. An anti-corporal punishment signature campaign was carried out, asking teachers to create safe, violence-free spaces in their schools. Surprisingly, some teachers hesitated to sign, openly acknowledging they may not be able to stop using corporal punishment despite existing laws against it. It is difficult to directly confront them so, we are engaging with a city level Teachers’ Union and a collective of some progressive teachers and sensitizing them to work on “Zero Tolerance Against Child Abuse”. It’s a slow and long-term process but will bare fruits in long run.
During this week, community activities were organized at public places like Pill Garden and Sardar Nagar Circle, where 188 children and 122 adults participated through poster displays, games, and awareness interactions. Parents also supported the campaign, contributing 111 signatures.
Balsena Annual Day
The 2025 Balsena Annual Program was as colourful and diverse as our Indian culture, with performances representing 16 states of India. The song "Aa Amaro Desh Che" (this is our nation) floated across the venue. The program's major themes were unity, equality, and respect for diversity, combining learning, play, discussion, and cultural expression to help children connect these values with their everyday lives. Age-appropriate activities focused on friendship, shared identity, and communal harmony through discussions, games, songs, and experiential learning. For instance, a simple Rock, Paper, and Scissors game was tweaked to help children understand fairness and equality. After lunch, children from each community gave performances. Each team was assigned an Indian state, and they presented about their culture through through role plays, dance, poem recitals, and traditional costumes—all arranged by the children themselves with minimal adult assistance.
The first draft of the Balsena Constitution was presented by the Balsena Council to other children after working on it since the Leadership Camp. The current draft covers values, identity, roles, responsibilities, and the election process. The Council will continue refining the document through regular meetings to detail values and other important components. Children who represented Balsena at national and state levels were felicitated by the Chief Guest, Mr. Nitin, a renowned cultural and arts preservationist based in Bhavnagar and working at the state and national level for promoting culture and heritage.
More than 450 children partiipated in this joyful occassion marking 23rd birthday of Balsena.
Gathering of Adolescent Girls (Kishori Samelan)
In the month of December, Kishori Sammelan was celebrated grand with 120 girls from Balsena and other girls from schools. The theme for this year’s Sammelan was “Me and My Identity” exploring oneself and reflecting about one’s own identity. This was also a topic that Balsena children demanded during the Council meeting. The activities were mostly finding one’s inner beauty, making one’s dream tree ad also exploring one’s own beliefs and values. One activity prompted children to find their role model in the recent Indian Blind Women’s and Women’s Cricket team who won world cups. The girls were able to find connection with their childhood with some of the players. This gave them the hope that the girls can also be leaders despite of the challenges. The key is consistent efforts with self-confidence.
Child Rights Sessions in Aashramshalas: This year we developed new child rights sessions that are easier for Aashramshala children to comprehend. Based on last year's learnings, children found Right to Protection and Right to Participation concepts difficult, and the Kathiawadi Gujarati vernacular did not align with the language spoken in tribal regions. The new sessions address these challenges.
In the Needs and Wants session—a precursor to child rights discussions—most children ranked parental love and affection above all other needs and wants, with a safe home and surroundings also topping the list.
After the Right to Protection sessions, children were surprised to learn that teachers cannot beat them or use any form of corporal punishment. Some children showed confidence that they will report such violence to responsible adults. We have currently asked children to share any such instances with us first to avoid blame or penalty falling on them.
Training and interaction with students of Dl.Ed.
Isha, member of our training team facilitated an interaction with 75 girls students studying Diploma in Education at Kasturba Gandhi Vidyalaya. During this training, importance of participation, creativity in education was discussed along withhow do we show integrity as adults who are role models for children. Isha also shared her own personal journey with education and her experiments of the same, along with discussion about Balsena and Aaranyak programs.
Volunteers from colleges:
Two girls from MKES college in Mumbai volunteered at Narmada district for 2 weeks. During this time they helped in data analysis work and took computer classes for children.
15 volunteers from Shamaldas College and MSW college, volunteered in Bhanvagar who helped in taking sessions with children, and make presentation about different states of India.
Capacity building
Shaishav is a learning organization. Every year we send team members to learn from the like-minded organizations so then can get much wider exposure and inculcate this learning to strengthen our programs. This year our program leaders had a meaningful week learning and experiencing the work of Muskaan and Eklavya in Bhopal. There was synergy in children's collectives and approaches to education and child-centered development in both organizations. From Eklavya, we learnt how to use library effectively to engage children actively and make reading very interesting activity for children. We decided to adopt several initiatives and strategies in Balsena and Aaranyak, such as encouraging children's writing through simple stories and reading those stories among the
Staff trainings are a weekly routine, but during this period we also hosted two resource persons from AVEHI Abacus, Mumbai, to train facilitators on the first part of their Sangati module, centered on the theme of self and collective identity.
By Isha Sheth | Project Leader
By Chandan Mohanty | Project Coordinator
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