SevaYatra - Experience
Skillsoft's volunteering day - planting & educational chart making with children..
Skillsoft Volunteering Day – 7th August, 2012
Skillsoft is a leading provider of elearning and performance support solutions for global enterprises, government, education and small to medium-sized businesses. Skillsoft enables business organizations to maximize business performance through a combination of comprehensive elearning content, online information resources, flexible learning technologies and support services.
As a part of Skillsoft’s Asia Business Review for 2 days in Gurgaon, the management decided that all the participating 20 employees from different Asia offices would participate in a half-day engaging service project with a local NGO in Gurgaon. Skillsoft also put aside an amount towards donation for the NGO.
Volunteering Day at Government Primary School:
As a part of their CSR, Skillsoft donated 20 desks & benches to the Government Primary School. On the day-of, 20 employees from different Asia offices spent half-day at a local Government Primary School, interacting with 20 kids from the NGO. The School is aided by an NGO Literacy India that focuses on underprivileged children thereby bringing a qualitative change in their lives through education including a variety of skills in performing arts, science, computer literacy and vocational activities.
After a quick orientation and welcome from SevaYatra and the school, the Asia Director at Skillsoft formally cut the ribbon and inaugurated the furniture that Skillsoft donated to the School that will be used for the Class XI students. After the inauguration, the group was split into 4 sub-groups with equal number of children paired with them. They played some fun games together that helped them break the ice between the diverse groups as well as created some team-building.
After some fun games, the group planted saplings in the school garden. Each volunteer alongwith a child was responsible for planting a sapling and exchange thoughts on the importance of conserving the environment.
Post the planting exercise, each volunteer was assigned a child to draw-up educational charts on different topics, but largely focusing on English grammar and constitutional rights and duties of an Indian citizen. It was interesting to see the group interact with eachother, beyond the language barriers. As much as the children benefitted from the interactions and the exercise, I would say the volunteers ended up learning much more than just a few words of spoken Hindi and I’m sure would agree that it was a day well spent!