Orientation and IEC materials

team members as well as the upper management of the organisation came together to explore the purpose of education, what children ought to know apart from their school curricula, what value systems the organisation ought to embody, and how to translate all these through deliberate practice and modelling so that our children can be inspired to follow these value systems. While the impact of these remains difficult to quantify, a step has been taken in the right direction and hopefully the following years will see a marked change in this aspect.

A life education compendium has also been developed by the Education team to form a bank of resources1 within the organization, which can be accessed by home teaching teams and children. The aim of this initiative is to empower individual home teams to take decisions on how different components of life education can be transacted.

“We concentrated on educating our people including children and establishing systems to ease the workload.” SPM, Pune

All internal and external interactions were limited to calls and online meetings, which was not a common practice for a majority of people in the organisation. Meetings between national team members and SPMs were organized every week in the first month and then reduced to once in a fortnight. Hence, there was a need to set-up protocols for online meetings as well as a need to orient team members on how to effectively use these new platforms of interaction.

There was a dire need to reduce the anxiety and panic among care-givers, children and the parents with regard to the pandemic. The Knowledge Development and Dissemination Centre (KDDC) unit took over the responsibility of undertaking the orientation program for these key stakeholders by developing/customizing relevant IEC materials and disseminating the same to Snehsaathis, children in the Homes and their parents. As it was not possible to have physical interactions for these orientations hence, the virtual mode was adopted, which was not easy because of the severe lack of digital access at the home level. Against all odds, these initiatives went ahead using the basic existing infrastructure and thanks to the quick procurement of essential equipment for this purpose.

The fundamental technical information and need for adherence to basic norms including isolation and quarantine procedures in the context of Covid-19 were disseminated to all levels of care-givers and managers through a series of on-line workshops and follow-up meetings with help from experts of the field, volunteers and designated trainers.

A poster series “Care in the times of Corona’’ has been developed by KDDC showcasing key measures to take care of children and team members. Teams in all states have been given an orientation on these posters and they in-turn oriented home team members. The first poster of the series jots down the things to remember while taking care of children in the lockdown period, as well as some ideas for how children can deal with situations where they feel angry. The second poster was created for residential team members who had been living in the homes along with children to keep them motivated. They had to maintain a balance between their responsibilities towards the children and the need to care for their own mental and emotional wellbeing. The final poster of the series describes a few guidelines to be followed by national and state team members with regard to self-care as well as the spirit of home-based caregivers.

1 Acquiring technology and special skills