2014 RTE Chennai: Awareness Raising

Our Right to Education awareness raising session was pretty informal on account of our late start. When one thinks of "awareness raising," they probably imagine a sane, civil gathering whereby parents are lovingly ushered into a nice auditorium and are given glossy pamphlets to reiterate the RTE's highlights. Though this is what we also envision next year, this year's efforts were much simpler.

The night before, I had created a poster which simply read, "If your child is entering LKG-1st standard, they may be eligible for free private school education. Come to our booth on School Street, 13th of May at 5pm, for more information and an application." I then got this translated into Tamil and made the message into a poster-sized sheet of paper.

Don't mind us...

On May 10th, 2014, me and my co-founder/husband, Sriram, went into our neighboring clearance housing boards with fliers created by Bhumi (a youth-based educational NGO). We thankfully had our apartment's watchman to lead us around the area, and he knew were to find the families with the young children. Also in tow was a member of Becoming I, who greatly assisted us with fielding Tamil-based queries of the parents.

Most of the residents were curious as to our presence, but I have to think handing out candy to their kids made it clear that we weren't much of a threat. Our greater concern was people assuming that we were affiliated with a political party--the election was around this time, after all!

We then placed our posters throughout the neighborhood. I honestly had no idea how many families would turn up to our information session. Getting such a ballpark figure is hard, although we can safely assume it's 40 families within one neighborhood.

Read our RTE poster!

What I would do differently next year:

For one, I'd easily start earlier! We were swamped the previous months, and admittedly, a part of me thought based on the attendance of the seminar where I first learned of the RTE that "someone else will surely do something. It's not like I'm needed." As the weeks rolled on, I asked other nonprofits in the area "hey, what are you guys doing for the RTE?" When I basically heard, "we're just doing information awareness," or, "we'll start something next year," I realized.... no group was working one-on-one with parents and schools. Though other organizations later got on board, it was then that I thought, "I guess I'll try to do something if few others are." I formulated a quick game plan and invited other organizations to get their volunteers involved in our efforts. Even then, I assumed my involvement would more be from a detached journalistic perspective: I'd chronicle my experience, write a rubric for each school's conduct, submit it to our press contacts, and call it a day. At no point did I expect to become so invested in the outcome of these families.

I would also book a venue in advance. As you'll read later, our information booth was literally a table in the middle of a hot, dusty road and a few plastic chairs. 

I'd also get better tape. Seriously, don't go putting up pieces of paper on less-than-clean walls using basic Scotch tape: when you come back down the same road ten minutes later, that poster will be dusty and torn on the ground. 

Giving out candy is great, but I would've ensured its distribution after we've spoken with the parents. Otherwise, kids have this laser-beam focus on sugary goodness rather than listening to the message. 

I would say that we'd expand our outreach, but I'm quite satisfied with our efforts in just one small area of the city. We learned so much, and 20 families for literally 2 people was all we could handle given our intensive hands-on approach to RTE work.