CSR & Child Rights
Awareness rallies, the campaign for the girl child and frontline outreach - the work that takes child protection out of our campus and into the streets of Vijayawada.
Beyond our gates: child rights and the community
Care & Share Charitable Trust does not work only with the children who come to live in our Homes. The children we are asked to protect are, overwhelmingly, poor children - street children, children who have run away to Vijayawada, children in the slums and children with disabilities. Protecting them means changing the community around them as well as the child.
That is why the Trust works alongside the government and with the FORUM FOR CHILD RIGHTS and CHILDLINE, and supports the Government Observation Home for boys. Our role is part of a wider system of protection, not a substitute for it.
To reach out to children in need of "care and protection" - with a special focus on girl children - is written into our mission. The activities on this page are how that mission leaves the campus and enters the streets.
Child-rights awareness rallies
Our awareness rallies are a familiar sight in the city. Children, staff and volunteers march with hand-made placards and banners carrying messages such as "Stop Child Abuse" and "Prevent", and at night we march by candlelight to hold the city’s attention.
These events have two audiences. The first is the public: to make child abuse and child neglect things a neighbour feels responsible for, rather than a private matter to be ignored. The second is the children themselves: a child who learns at eight years old that they have rights, and that adults will stand with them, carries that knowledge for life.
The placards in the photographs below were made and carried by the children of our Homes and schools. The message is theirs as much as ours.
The girl child
A special focus on girl children runs through all of our work, from the classroom to the rally. Our girls have spoken for themselves in campaigns with signs such as "Give girls the wings to fly, not the pain to cry".
We protect girls through our Homes, our schools and our literacy centres, and by keeping them in education - the single most effective protection any girl can have. Our women’s self-help groups extend that protection into the household, since a mother with an income and a voice is better placed to keep her daughter in school.
Frontline outreach
Our workers go into the urban deprived areas of Kandrika, Auto Nagar and Rajiv Nagar, and into the settlements around our campuses, to meet families where they are - greeting a mother with a baby, following up an absent child, or simply making it known that help is available.
Outreach is slow, unglamorous work and it is the beginning of almost everything else we do. Families are supported in place while children remain at home; children who cannot be cared for at home are received into our Homes; and children who are lost to the streets are met by a system in which we play a part.
How companies and supporters can help
Our child-rights and community programmes are largely funded by voluntary contributions and by the sponsorships of individuals and families through our Distance Adoption Programme. Corporate partners can support specific campaigns, sponsor the education of a cohort of children, or contribute to equipment for our vocational units.
If your organisation would like to support this work - or join us at a future awareness event - we would be glad to hear from you.
