This year Zurich Community Trust is proud to extend its India programme and welcome on board two new partners - MAYA (The Movement for Alternatives and Youth Awareness and APSA (The Association for the Promotion of Social Action).
The India programme, set up in 1994, provides funding support to build up capacity and promote partnership working at grassroots level in Southern India. It also provides exciting opportunities for Zurich staff to get involved through a range of 4 week assignments, of benefit both to the partner organisations and to themselves in terms of professional and personal development.
The two new partners, appointed in March 2008, take the current portfolio of partners to seven and mark an important development for the programme with an added focus on Child Rights. This is an exciting extension of the programme’s existing focus on disability issues, ranging from locomotor disabilities, speech and hearing impairments to mental health.
With an initial funding commitment from the Trust of three years to support organisational growth, the new partnerships will enable Zurich to help improve the educational and life chances for some of Karnataka’s most vulnerable children. Karnataka is the state in which these Bangalore-based organisations primarily operate, although they also extend activities to the north into Andhra Pradesh.
• APSA works with children and their carers to help them participate in the local decision-making process. They are a grass-roots organisation working closely with the urban poor and helping them to take part in the decisions that affect their lives. Street children, child labourers, abandoned and runaway children and child victims of abuse and prostitution are supported on a large variety of programmes including a school and Bangalore’s own version of ChildLine.
• MAYA also started life rescuing street children but have since evolved into an organisation working on the root causes of the problem – namely access to quality education and development of livelihood opportunities. They focus on the right of every child to quality education through an elementary school reform initiative which looks at the quality of schools in 12 districts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
In addition, MAYA Organic addresses livelihood issues of the working poor through organising them into worker-owned enterprises and providing supporting marketing and business structures to ensure success of these collectives. As with all the Trust's India partners, the aim is to achieve positive and sustainable results on the ground through working directly with the communities and people affected – in these cases the children, parents, school committees themselves as well as the State education authorities.
A key attraction of working with MAYA and APSA, is that there are already several key assignment opportunities for staff to consider which will help these organisations reach more vulnerable people and help them shape their own futures.
David Nash, the Trust's India Programme Manager, says of these partnerships “I am delighted to have brought a new dimension to the network of partners who are operating in South India. Both MAYA and APSA will add not only a child rights perspective but new approaches to common problems. Both organisations are led by talented people, whose skill and experience can influence others’ thinking. There are also great opportunities for Zurich staff to get involved. I look forward to helping these organisations to grow over the medium to long term.”
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Our 83rd assignee - David Leake, Group Head of Corporate Identity, from Corporate Marketing in Swindon - has just returned from Chennai after a week-long assignment for The Banyan, helping them to develop branding principles which will ultimately help to develop a strong brand identity.
Karen Greenow-Evans, Team Manager from Personal Lines Cardiff office, will also be going to The Banyan in September to support the HR Manager to create a framework for HR practice that will ensure that all staff are treated fairly.
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