In conjunction with our parent organization, ASHA For Education, Detroit Chapter, we at ASHA for MSU focus on an annual specific project which 100% of the funds we raise go to. This year, all our proceeds from any events or fundraisers will go to the Kuvempu project of the Bharati Trust, an organization that runs informal educational centers in villages around Chitraturga, Karnataka, a state in southern India. 

 

From the ASHA Detroit webpage:

 

Organization Description

Kuvempu project of Bharathi Trust with the help from Asha imparts vocational training and creates awareness among a cluster of villages around Chitraturga, Karnataka. Listed below are some of the main activities:

- Vidya Kendras (evening school and tuition centers)
- Scholarships to help children complete high school and continue higher education
- Vocational training for youth
- Serves as a resource center for teaching/learning materials and a village Library Network
- Works with children of migrant laborers
- Partners with Government schools
- Helps citizens to obtain entitled benefits from the Government

 

Goals

The core team of Kuvempu has been informally working together since July 2000. The overall goals of the trust are:

- to transform individuals to live based on love, trust and compassion.

- to create a society which functions based on equality, justice and freedom.

 

Among its many action-oriented goals, the trust at this time is able to pursue the following.

a) to run non-formal centers for working and drop-out children.

b) to run motivational centers so that poor children can join and do well in regular school.

c) to create self-employment opportunities by arranging various vocational training programs in coordination with governmental and non-governmental institutions.

d) to give counseling and guidance to youth towards job opportunities outside their villages.

e) to motivate youth to plant, water and take care of trees and plants on roadside and residential areas.

f) to work for eradication of untouchability and caste-related taboos in public places.

g) to promote harmonious peaceful community living of people of different castes, class and religion.

h) to form cultural team to perform traditional dance and music programs for community awareness on various social issues.

 

Brief Background of the Area

In spite of 55 years of independence from foreign rule, village life in our area of work, currently Chitradurga and Devangere districts of Karnataka, persists in degrading caste taboos, prejudices and inequalities. Madiga people (Dalits in the narrow sense) even today are not allowed inside certain public places such as hotels, given a separate aluminum tumbler and plate if allowed, not served by barbers, not allowed inside temples, etc. This is not to mention the slave-like treatment meted out to them as laborers and servants in private homes. Among the poor Lambadis, rampant alcoholism, gambling, thieving and wife-beating, and in some places prostitution of married women is keeping them in total darkness. For the poor children, though there is easy access to government schools in many villages, most children drop-out by 4th or 5th grade without even clear knowledge of the Kannada alphabets let alone be able to read or write. Many become laborers, some even bonded for 5 to 7 years by their parents to the rich. Being mostly landless, uneducated and unskilled, the poor youth take to the path of their parents with the same manual labor, same low wages and same hopelessness for betterment. To keep their minds away from the painful problems of life, they often take to drinking, gambling, addictively watching commercial cinemas, etc. and the grip of poverty and deprivation only tightens as the generations pass by. It is in such an area with deep, age-old and widespread problems that Kuvempu has entered to focus its modest energies to bring about socio-economic changes and build a society based on equality, justice and freedom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above is a picture from our previous project, Shanti Sadhana Ashram, one of the pioneer organizations in championing the cause of literacy in the less developed districts of Assam.

 

For more information, please visit http://www.ashanet.org/detroit/project.html