Awareness Generation
From End Of Poverty
2. Awareness Generation:
Identified poor in these villages live with negative apprehensions having faced the misery in their lives. They have no hope on their future and as such as they have come to the conclusion that their lives have to continue like their parents and grand parents in distress and despair and similarly their children and grand children also have to follow their foot-steps. This is the strong conviction imbibed among these target families and it paved a way to develop aversion on the society in general and thereby youth converting as anti-social elements.
Hence, an immediate task in the starting of the project is to change the mindset of the target poor in these villages. As it has been inbuilt in their minds, it is a difficult and most important task to initiate the development process in these communities. While ASSIST has tried with constant house-visits, group meetings, mass meetings and so on to change their mind set, the most successful tool has been delivering the messages through the cultural performances. While the good number of meetings are not giving any result, one skit played through a cultural performance has made a significant change in the mind set of the target poor.
Accordingly, ASSIST has developed professional cultural teams from its field workers and they have been assigned the task of identifying the problems in the respective communities during the day time and performing the events such as songs, dances, skits, play-lets, etc. in the evening to enable the poor to reflect on the problems and to raise confidence among the poor. Two such camps are organised in a village during the 1st year and one camp in a year is organised in 2nd and 3rd years. In all the villages, such camps will be organised by these professional teams. It eases the process initiated by the Cluster In-charges who will do the follow-up in the following days through the house visits, group meetings, mass meetings, etc.
Another important activity planned under awareness generation is organising mass rallies in cluster headquarters covering 5 villages on various issues such as child labour, women empowerment, water conservation, usage and management, community health, etc. Rallies will be organised with the involvement of children, youth, women and representatives of people’s organisations to draw the attention of public on these issues and to develop a debate and discussion on these issues among the target population. Charts, placards, banners, etc. will be displayed with pictures and messages to draw the attention of the target population. Ten such rallies at the rate of one per cluster will be organised for a period of 3 years.
Another important item draws the attention of the people is a poster or painting with pictures posing some questions about the status of their village. This will attract a group of people to gather before such poster or painting and start reflecting on it through debate or argument. Solution for any problem can only be initiated by instigating a discussion or argument or debate on that particular problem. As such, posters and paintings will be useful to start initiating the discussion on the burning problems prevailing in these villages. All the villages will be exhibited with posters and paintings on various problematic issues such as education, water, health, hygiene, sanitation, farming practices, etc.
ASSIST conceives an idea of organising special events on important occasions such as Women’s Day, Water Day, etc. to draw the importance of this event to the target population. Organising a event on this special day with celebrations, exhibitions, highlighting the problems, inviting the specialists, etc will have a significant impact on the target population to concentrate on the prevailing problems in that particular issue chosen. This will also provide an opportunity to exchange ideas among the target people of different villages as it will be organised at area level. Some of the people’s organisations who have done some activities in that particular sector will be motivated to express their stories and it will instigate others to replicate the same with necessary modifications necessary and adoptable in their particular village. Two such events are planned in a year for 3 years.
