Project Kuvempu – Scholarship for teachers

Kuvempu Trust is a group of people who have come together to do constructive activities in the villages for the children, youths, men and women. It was in existence since 2000 and was registered under the current name in 2002. Initially starting out as a group of enthusiastic village youth around Shivaganga village in Chitradurga district of Karnataka with a desire to improve working conditions of daily wage earners, Kuvempu Trust has diversified into many aspects of village development. Key areas are evening schools (Vidya Kendras), liaison between Government and villages, library network, vocational training, and street theater.

Around 700 children attend the schools at 19 Vidya Kendras taught by 21 teachers. The children come to the center right after school for the play hour (5-6 PM). The tuition runs between 6-8:30 PM. There is a well functioning library, which houses between 500-1000 books. The library hosts a significant collection of Kannada books and is most likely to be one of the best, if not the best, in the area. Vocational training programs offer classes in tailoring, screen printing, bag-making and typewriting for older children and youth. Kalajatha (street theater) programs have been taking the message of social change from village to village through the gentle and attractive medium of songs, dance and drama. The main focus is on issues like sending children to school, perniciousness of addictive alcoholism, and need for community harmony across all castes and religions.

The teachers at Kuvempu Trust have been serving the students and community with great sincerity and dedication. Some of them have been with the project for about 5 years now. The teachers teach at the Kendra everyday from 6pm to 8:30pm. In addition, they are responsible for facilitating interaction between parents and government school teachers and administration. The teachers work with children who have dropped out of school and help them integrate back to government school. Some of the teachers also work with government authorities in helping the villagers get official work done such as scholarships for handicapped, caste certificates, widow pensions etc. These field-workers are expected to help not only the village where Vidya Kendra is present but also neighboring villages as and when possible. They also help the community organize itself and try and solve its problems on its own.

To encourage some of the most dedicated staff with a basic financial assistance so that they need not struggle with a daily-wage job in addition to all their responsibilities, this proposal aims to raise corpus funds to support teacher salaries from the interest accrued. The corpus will become a long-term asset for the organization. The plan is to raise, over next two years, enough funds to support 5-6 teachers continually. WAH 2005 will support at least one teacher.