YASHODHARA SHELTER HOME PROJECT FOR VULNERABLE CHILDREN

"Sheltering hope"

The aim of this Project is that vulnerable children in Pune may live in a place where they can find the proper care to develop their potential and the highest possibilities of choice and participation in life. From this space, created by Fundación Asha-Kiran, we offer

  • Possibilities of access to education and vocational training to mainstream the children into the country's educational and productive system.
  • Possibilities of access to health and hygiene facilities to promote a healthy global development.
  • The chance to live in an environment where affection and observance of the children's rights are insured.

The Project sets out from an orientation based on Convention on the Rights of the Child as set forth by the United Nations, which acts as a beacon for our objectives, the methodology we use and the activities we undertake. This favors a positive and global intervention in which the children, their families and their communities participate.

Its implementation allows the development of vulnerable children and that of their environment while giving attention to those areas where their rights are violated. Always keeping the children's foremost interests in mind, we propose an intervention that will entail an improvement of the children's health, education and safety, setting off from a thorough knowledge of children's plight and interacting with and within their environment.

At present, Yashodhara can house a total of 46 girls and boys, and we continue evaluating applications to take in more vulnerable children.

Thanks to the Yashodhara Shelter Home Project, children have access to more dignified living conditions, like Gauri, aged 8.

Gauri's mother died at childbirth and her father died soon thereafter. At a very young age and in abject poverty, Gauri was left at her grandmother's care together with her three siblings. After her grandmother died in 2008, she and her brothers and sister had no one to look after them.

Gauri was referred to Asha-Kiran by the NGO Women in Action due to her precarious family circumstances (one of her brothers is an alcoholic, another one is HIV+, and her older sister couldn't take care of her because she works as a live-in maid). When she arrived at Yashodhara, she had serious behavioral and relationship problems with adults and other children. Hardly two weeks after being admitted, changes could be seen in Gauri which have now consolidated; she has learned to read and write, she is interested in school and in the activities that we undertake, and has become a joyful, affectionate, open and respectful child.

View the Project summary: [pdf]